Quality Assurance Tools and Techniques.

Information & Training. | Quality Management Tools & Techniques.

All organizations need a quality management system regardless of size or profit motivation. In commercial business, the standard approach is to obtain international certification against relevant industry standards, for example the ISO 9001 standard. In smaller, non for profit organizations, formal certification may not be a necessity, however, for every businesses to grow and develop, there needs to be a quality assurance system appropriate to the organization’s needs and there needs to be a set of tools and techniques which can allow the organization to continually improve their product and service offering, their customer experience, their supplier interactions and their overall operational efficiency.

Quality Assurance Tools and Techniques are methodologies which facility the achievement of the key organizational quality objectives. The selected tools and techniques will be unique to each individual business.

Brainstorming. 5 Why’s Analysis. Capability Analysis. FTA. FMEA. HAZOP. Customer focus. Communication within teams. … Information and training presentation on Quality Assurance Tools and Techniques. >>>

How does a business select the appropriate improvement methodologies…

… best suited to their current status and development ambitions? There are a myriad of tools and techniques available, ranging from organizational wide strategic improvement methodologies such as Lean Processing, down to individual problem solving techniques such as Fault Tree Analysis, DMAIC, etc., etc. The selection process will be influenced by prior practice and experience within the business of improvement techniques, it will be influenced by the existing competence of the staff, the culture prevailing within the organization towards the introduction of new improvement methodologies, the level of authority of those seeking to implement new improvement techniques, the regulatory and competitive environment.

What are typical tools and techniques?

Problem solving techniques such as 5 why’s analysis, Cause and Effect Diagrams, Cycle-time analysis are all widely applied to help understand problems and to help identify solutions. In some organizations statistical analysis techniques such as statistical process control or process capability analysis will be implemented as a means of understanding process performance and identifying improvement opportunities. In capital intensive industry, improvement approaches such as measuring and setting objectives around overall equipment effectiveness can be very efficient in driving quality improvement, as increasing the OEE % requires improved operating stability, reduced output defect rates, etc.

Deciding on the appropriate quality assurance tool and technique should be considered in a logical, planned manner.

The first approach should be to determine the current situation.

What tools and techniques are currently applied within the organization? What techniques are understood by employees, yet are not being applied for improvement? Knowing this information provides a good base line from which to define the organization’s approach towards promoting and optimizing it use of the various Quality Tools and Techniques.

Is there a strategy for organizational quality assurance development?

If yes, does it talk about preferred approaches to improvement. For example, is there a desire to further involve employees in driving continuous improvement, is the focus on creating a lean organization, is the focus on improving product reliability, etc. The strategic plan can often point an organization towards specific quality assurance tools and techniques.

Bottom-up or Top down approach to quality improvement?

Improvement can be driven from the bottom-up, for example, via systematically identifying individual process or product failings and implementing root cause failure investigation and problem solution. This form of approach to improvement, requires knowledge of specific tools and techniques such as HAZOP analysis, process failure mode effects analysis, etc.. Alternatively, improvement may be directed from the top-down, here the techniques applied will be of the form of Just-In-Time process introduction, implementation of organization wide validation programs, etc..

Informed decision making.

In all instances an understanding of the various quality assurance tools and techniques will be a pre-requisite to making an effective decision with regard to the optimum improvement methodologies to be applied within an organization.

Quality Improvement Techniques

Information & Training. | Total Quality Management Tools and Techniques …

- - - Continuous improvement utilizing Analytical Techniques.
    - Brainstorming
    - 5 why’s analysis
    - Process Flow Diagrams/Flowcharts/Process Mapping
    - Check sheets /Check Lists
    - Run charts
    - Histograms
    - Scatter Diagrams/Scatter Plot
    - Cause and Effect/Fishbone/Ishikawa Diagrams
    - Identifying sources & causes of variation
    - Control/Shewart Charts/DPU Charts
    - Cpk and Ppk Analysis
    - Pareto Analysis
    - Bottleneck Analysis
    - Benchmarking
    - FMEA
    - FTA
    - HAZOP
    - PDCA/DMAIC/DMADV
    - SIPOC
    - Etc. Etc.
    - Information & Training presentation >>>