Quality Assurance

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to discuss quality assurance and total quality management as a business strategy designed to add value to customers. It begins by discussing the roots of quality assurance and total quality management, TQM, looks at some of the difficulties with TQM implementation and argues that a properly designed approach to training and development for quality is required. The paper concludes with three recommendations for people in organizations to implement TQM effectively. The Roots Of QA Quality assurance (QA) came from two ideas about how to run organizations better. The first was about customers. If we can figure out what it is our customers like, and produce it the same every time, our customers will come back to us, tell others about us, and we'll become more successful. We can think about quality in this way as reliability - you know what you're going to get - and replicability - we can reproduce it so it's the same every time. The second impetus behind the QA movement was about efficiency. If we can figure out the most efficient way to produce a product or service, and stop wasting time, materials, replacing broken-down goods or delivering unsatisfactory services - we'll be more successful. Quality, under this mindset, is about simplicity and designing out potential mistakes. Why simplicity? Because the simpler a process or a product is, the more likely it is to be right. Operationally, business owners and managers wished to harness the emerging technologies of automation and mechanization, thereby creating a shift from expensive, labour-intensive and often unreliable personal craftsmanship towards cheaper, reliable, machine-intensive, robot craftsmanship. To make both of these aspirations realizable simultaneously, the notion of setting output specifications, and conforming to them by understanding and controlling manufacturing process variables, was born. The result was a brand which gave an assurance to the customer of reliability and replicability. The clearest antecedent of the modem quality assurance and control movements is Eli Whitney, the US armaments manufacturer, who, in the nineteenth century, made his weapons the product of choice for the US army by being both cheaper and more reliable than any other manufacturer. As well as having a cheaper price and a more reliable product he also made more profit. How did this best-of-all-world scenario come about? Through quality assurance. QA can be a "magic bullet" which provides lower cost, higher customer service, better products and services, and higher margins. Without QA, assuring and adding value become an impossible proposition. The earliest lessons of the quality movement, still applicable today, are those of:understanding consumer and customer product usage and desires, and delivering a product which matches those needs ("fitness for purpose");drawing detailed specifications and manufacturing carefully to them ("conformance to specification");understanding and managing the variables in the manufacturing process which can lead to deviation from specification ("process control");keeping detailed records of the process, allowing deviations to be traced and rectified ("quality audit/document control").