Quality

• Quality


  Meeting a standard for a good or service to meet consumer needs and expectations
• Businesses will try to achieve quality through:

  • Purchasing high quality raw materials to make product
  • Ensure that each stage is completed to the required standard in the production process
  • Equipping employees with necessary skills through training
  • Implementing quality assurance and control
• Quality control


  Involves inspecting a sample of goods produced at the end of the production process to ensure that specifications have been met
• Two advantages and disadvantages of quality control


  Advantages

  • Reduces the risk of a faulty product reaching customer
  • Problem areas can be identified and action taken

  Disadvantages

  • Waste levels can be high as a fault will only be found at the end of the process
  • Requires specialist personnel
• Quality awards


  Evidence of high standards – these show customers that certain standards have been met
• Wastage


  Occurs when products cannot be sold because they are of poor quality, or damaged, or stock is out of date
• Quality assurance


  A guarantee given by producers to consumers that certain standards have been met throughout the production process. Legal standards have been met and/or codes of practice have been followed
• Quality assurance involves:

  • inspecting quality at each stage of the production process
  • achieved through a system of total quality management
  • making everyone in a business responsible for quality
  • each employee ensuring what they pass on to the next person is of the correct quality
• Two advantages and disadvantages of quality assurance


  Advantages

  • Motivated staff as everyone is given responsibility
  • Better business reputation due to quality of products

  Disadvantages

  • Relies on commitment of all staff
  • Training must be provided
• Total Quality Management (TQM)


  Creates quality through continuous improvement, development of systems and products and by creating an organisational culture of quality
• Production management and control methods for TQM:

  • Quality chains ➔ the next person in the production process (chain) is treated as a customer and customer satisfaction is the objective
  • Monitoring ➔ checking that standards at each link in the chain are being achieved and the use of statistical tools to measure levels of failure to achieve quality
  • Zero defects ➔ attempting to achieve perfect product quality, time after time