Question

The following exercise pertains to the Control Quality process.

a.   What does Control Quality monitor and what does it compare the results to?

b.   Describe inspection.

c.   How do inspection and prevention differ?

d.   What is attribute conformity? What is the resulting decision from attribute measurement results?

e.   Describe the purpose of control charts. What are they used for primarily?

f.    What are the common causes of variance?

Answer 1

a) Quality control monitors the quality of a product or service of a business and ensures that such quality is maintained or improved. Thus, this quality of products or services is compared to specific benchmarks that training personnel set and accordingly, products are tested for identifying statistically significant variations.

b) Inspection or quality inspection refers to the process of examining, testing and measuring one or more characteristics of a product and consequently, comparing its results to some specific requirements for analyzing whether conformity is achieved for each such characteristic.

c) Quality Control team performs inspection for detecting errors during the production process inspection. On the other hand, the Quality Assurance team undertakes prevention to ensure minimal or no errors take place during the process. Thus, the cost of preventing errors is less than the cost of correcting them, which are found by inspection.

d) In attribute sampling, the data is in the attribute form and the result either conforms or does not. Thus, attribute conformity refers to the method of measuring the quality consisting of the presence or absence of some specific attributes in the samples under consideration. The result from an attribute sampling is to identify whether an item is defective or not.

e) A control chart is a graph that helps in studying how a process changes over time. The purpose of such a chart is to set an upper and a lower boundary of acceptable performance concerning a normal variation. Thus, control charts are used primarily for monitoring defects, inventory, production time, cost per unit, billing errors, customer support calls, past-due invoices, unplanned employee absences, missed appointments and others.

f) Some of the common causes of variation are poor design, poor maintenance of machines, lack of properly defined operating procedures, substandard materials, measurement errors and quality control errors.

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