How to Satisfy Internal & External Customers’ Requirements

“If you don’t have time to do it right you must have time to do it over.” – John Wooden, American basketball player and head coach at UCLA

“Give them quality. That’s the best kind of advertising.” - Milton Hersey , He founded the Hershey Chocolate Company

“Quality is the best business plan.” ~John Lasseter

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different outcomes.” Einstein “If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.” - Maslow “What's measured improves” ― Peter F. Drucker

“ Quality is more important than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles.” Steve Jobs Co-founder, Chairman, and CEO of Apple Inc. Primary investor and CEO of Pixar Founder and CEO of NeXT

“ Quality is everyone's responsibility.” W. Edwards Deming

The purpose of quality is to provide the customer with a product that works. An overall Set of instructions to guarantee the quality of the “system”. Any action directed toward providing customers with goods and services of appropriate quality. Documentation Training Inspection Tracking Monitoring Reporting Improvement Corrections Regulatory bodies

QA is also:

• Continuous Improvement;
• Enhancing value through new products and services;
• Reducing errors, defects, waste, and costs;
• Increasing productivity and effectiveness;
• Improving responsiveness and cycle time performance;
• Quality can mean the difference between excellence and disaster;
• Quality rule;
• Customer based organizations;
• Understand your internal and external customer needs and strive to exceed them.

Customer Expectations

Your customers expect you to deliver quality products. If you do not, they will quickly look for alternatives. Quality is critical to satisfying your customers and retaining their loyalty so they continue to buy from you in the future. Quality products make an important contribution to long-term revenue and profitability. They also enable you to charge and maintain higher prices.

Costs

Poor quality increases costs. If you do not have an effective quality control system in place, you may incur the cost of analyzing nonconforming goods or services to determine the root causes and retesting products after reworking them. In some cases, you may have to scrap defective products and incur additional production costs to replace them. If defective products reach customers, you will have to pay for returns and replacements and, in serious cases, you could incur legal costs for failure to comply with customer or industry standards.

Satisfying Internal & External customers’ requirements.

• Increase Productivity.
• Cost and Time saving.
• Gives you a chance to correct your mistake ”Reduces Big Blunders ”
• Up Time and Down time Machines.
• Increase in Revenue.
• Increase in Clients.

Quality assurance: Consistency, efficiency and productivity We address this topic with three questions:

• What is quality assurance?
• Why is quality assurance important?
• What are some examples of quality assurance? What is quality assurance?

Simply stated, quality assurance is assuring quality. In our personal and business lives, we all have excellent tasks, procedures and processes in place that are not executed correctly – as specified – every single time. Quality assurance is assuring that tasks, procedures and processes are executed exactly as intended every time. Quality assurance sounds simple. Let me assure you; it is not. We go to educational meetings, read materials, talk to our colleagues, study our records, hire consultants and build on our experiences in deciding what inputs to use, procedures to follow and, in general, make decisions to maximize or optimize productivity, efficiency and profitability. The resources available and these decisions establish an unknown but real maximum potential outcome. Any and every time these decisions are not implemented exactly as specified, performance will fall below that potential. Let’s look at some examples:

1. Given our knowledge/expertise/skills and what needs to be accomplished in our position, each of us begins each day with an unknown but real potential for what we can accomplish – our potential. Every time we lose time because we have not established proper priorities, work on a task someone else should be doing, or keep working when a break would increase productivity, we fall further behind our potential for that day. Time management and other tools to reach our potential are quality assurance.
2. Probably the most common example of quality assurance on dairy farms is proper milking procedure. We can, for example, look at this specifically in terms of somatic cell count (SCC). Great effort is made to put together a detailed milking procedure. That procedure and the physical layout of the facility again determine that unknown but real potential – in this case, the level of the SCC. Each time that procedure is not followed exactly reduces the likelihood of reaching that potential, resulting in an increase in the SCC. The milking procedure is a great example of quality assurance.

Why is quality assurance important? Quality assurance is needed to enable success. It is not something that is needed because people are stupid or unmotivated; it is needed to attain the excellence required to go to that new, next level of management. Let me share a personal example of quality assurance. I am an avid fan of the University of Minnesota women’s hockey team. For the last several years I have been responsible for receptions held after the games for members of the team’s fan club. I have had to plan these receptions three to four times a year. Early on, I developed a checklist that I use for each reception. Did I develop the checklist because I don’t know what to do, am unmotivated or stupid? No! I developed and use it for two reasons: to ensure that I don’t forget one or two of the many details and so I don’t have to waste time recalling everything and doubling back to do things I overlooked. The checklist is a quality assurance tool to enable me to have everything ready for every reception.

This is the most important message of this article: Quality assurance is necessary to enable ourselves and our employees to succeed. What are some examples of quality assurance? A key to reaching this new, higher level of management is to expand our concept of developing tasks, procedures and processes. In addition to specifying the task, procedure or process, each time we need to also explicitly design a quality assurance program to ensure the potential is reached. In agriculture, we have too often referred to all quality assurance as developing SOPs (standard operating procedures). SOPs are needed for quality assurance in situations, like the milking procedure, where tasks must be completed in a specific sequence. Where the sequence is not necessarily crucial, as in my reception checklist example, an SOP is not appropriate, as it overly controls the person completing the process, likely reducing motivation. Checklists and to-do lists are two of the many additional tools for quality assurance. A checklist is best used for a list of tasks that must all be executed correctly to successfully complete an activity. The order is not critical to the performance of the tasks or activity, but each must be completed each time the activity is performed. A to-do list is great for identifying tasks that need to be completed or as a repository for tasks to be completed when time is available.

Quality assurance is a system companies use to review products, and the production system, to ensure consistent, quality results. Manufacturing organizations, as well as service industries, can employ quality assurance techniques. A quality assurance system can help your company identify weaknesses and inconsistencies in the service or production method.

Quality assurance systems identify areas that result in scrap, or products that don't meet company specifications. When the company reduces its number of defective products, it experiences scrap reduction. Scrap reduction results in savings; identification of defects early in the production process decreases the cost to the company, because fewer man-hours and materials have been used. Time Efficiency A quality assurance team can reduce the amount of inspections required in a manufacturing organization. The quality assurance team is separate from the production group, and can therefore be objective in identifying time-wasting areas during production. They also ensure that production workers don't use valuable production time to inspect or evaluate the production system.

The quality assurance system improves the quality of products and services, which increases customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction leads to repeat business, customer referrals, increased sales and profits. A quality assurance system eliminates defective products and continuously evaluates the process to improve products and services. Quality assurance can result in a consistently reliable product or service. Increased reliability in the end product results in customer satisfaction and brand loyalty. Companies with reliable quality gain a favorable reputation in the industry.

Employee morale is higher in a company using a quality assurance system, since the organization is more likely to run well, and actively seeks methods for improvement, according to the National Institute of Accountants. For example, a system of quality assurance, such as Total Quality Management, involves employees in the process of quality improvement. Employees become stakeholders in the organization and its success. Improved employee morale results in less absenteeism and turnover among workers.