How do I Choose the Best Quality Control Plan?

Generally, you may choose a quality control plan based on how well it addresses safety measures within your company. Looking at the best practices for quality control methods at similar industries might provide a broader perspective on the acceptable levels of product or service quality. Choosing a quality control plan that expands as the company needs change may eliminate costly disruptions to productivity. Analyzing employee competency levels might reveal inadequate training that may result in poor quality production. Another possible consideration for choosing a quality control plan is selecting one that aligns with regulatory guidelines in your area.

You could select a plan that identifies potential problems related to manufacturing your product. Some quality control plans may have a safety tool that requires multiple tests to uncover weak spots in the design of a product or service. The process might lead to ceasing production while tracing the original problem. Generally speaking, this is not a bad thing. Rather, this might be an opportunity to fix potential problems before they cause expensive damages to the company’s bottom line.

Exploring the best practices of companies similar to or within the same industry as your company is way to look at various quality control techniques. This provides insight into what works — and what does not work — when maintaining a high level of quality. You could review some of your company's issues and how they were addressed elsewhere. By adapting effective best practices to your company, the plan will likely meet industry-accepted standards.

Choosing a plan that is adaptable to the growth of your company might help with strategic planning. Having foresight of the growing needs of your company could allow streamlining quality control changes into an existing process. This approach may reduce the time devoted to determining if the existing plan is still viable and undoing an entire process.

Further consideration for choosing the best quality control plan is conducting an analysis of employee competency. An analysis could identify key areas where employees lack the right skills. With the analysis, you could also determine the type of training necessary to improve the quality of work.

In general, no plan used to control the quality of products should exist without consideration of the regulatory guidelines that exist in your area. Regulatory guidelines may serve as a measuring tool for the product or service you manufacture. Additionally, regulatory guidelines may help to sharpen internal controls for meeting quality standards.

An internal quality control policy is another consideration. A plan normally dictates what should occur; the policy dictates what must occur. Creating a quality control policy may help to ensure that each department involved with the design, development, and manufacture of a product or service follows a boilerplate to achieve consistency. The policy might also reaffirm the purpose of following the specific guidelines of a quality control plan.