Quality in production is the efficiency with which you make your products or provide your services. While the quality of your products may be in superior in your customer’s eyes, your profit margin is the judge of your production quality. The as you increase the efficiency with which you make your products or provide your services your waste, time and costs will decrease. Here are 7 tips to help increase the quality of your production:
1. Buy for quality first and price second, not the other way around
Too often the long term benefits of quality are sacrificed for the short term benefits of price. It is important to balance the long-term value of what you get versus the price you pay. This concept applies to everything in your company from inventory to employees.
2. Continuously hunt for flaws and fix them before they grow into serious problems
A commitment to quality means more than having regular inspections; high quality workmanship rarely ever fails inspection. Most people try to resolve problems after they are too big to be ignored. The more practical approach and less expensive approach is to develop continuously evolving systems that looks at solving problems at the source.
3. Implement employee education and training programs
Quality is everyone’s responsibility, not just the responsibility of management or quality control. Investments will come back to you many times over. See how to transform change management to positive experience for your employees.
4. Integrate accountability for quality control into your production positions
Building responsibility for quality where it should be directly into your production process and into the hands of your production staff will ensure that quality is a priority. If there are separate positions for quality control rotating them will make it a higher priority.
5. Encourage and support problem solving at all levels of employment
When people are empowered to make decisions they take more responsibility for their actions. A staff of caring, thinking human beings needs to be at the helm of your business. To learn more about how to build a strong organization culture read 3 guiding principles to effective organizational design.
6. Encourage and reward pride in workmanship
Nothing will affect your quality levels more than employees who care. You can encourage this by openly demonstrating your appreciation of a job well done and by sharing success stories.
7. Use statistics to analyze and monitor your progress
What is measured is managed. Looking for ways to quantify the quality of you production process will help you better understand when you have improved. The most important of these will become part of your Key Performance Indicators. Whatever you measure, make sure it is as simple and as automatic as possible a process.
To get to the route of a problem keep repeating “why?”
Quality control should be integrated into your production process rather than something separate. When errors do occur there is often an error in the process. Ask yourself why a quality control problem exists and keep asking the same question about the answer and eventually the problem will reveal itself. A systems oriented solution will cost less than replacing people, Wardell has 4 great tips for greater business system efficiency to help you on your way.