Quality control
In engineering and manufacturing, quality control or quality assurance is a set of measures taken to ensure that defective products or services are not produced, and that the design meets performance requirements. It includes the regulation of the quality of raw materials, assemblies, products and components; services related to production; and management, production, and inspection processes.
Traditional statistical process controls in manufacturing operations usually proceed by randomly sampling and testing a fraction of the output. Variances of critical tolerances are continuously tracked, and manufacturing processes are corrected before bad parts can be produced.
A valuable process to perform on a whole consumer product is failure testing, the operation of a product until it fails, often under stresses such as increasing vibration, temperature and humidity. This exposes many unanticipated weaknesses in a product, and the data is used to drive engineering and manufacturing process improvements. Often quite simple changes can dramatically improve product service, such as changing to mould-resistant paint, or adding lock-washed placement to the training for new assembly personnel.
Many organizations use statistical process control to bring the organization to Six Sigma levels of quality, in other words, so that the likelihood of an unexpected failure is confined to six standard deviations on the normal distribution. This probability is less than four one-millionths. Items controlled often include clerical tasks such as order-entry, as well as conventional manufacturing tasks.
One of the most widely used paradigms for QA management is the PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) approach, also known as the Shewhart Cycle.
Related topics
- Six Sigma
- Software testing
- Validation
- Manufacturing
- List of production topics
- Total Quality Management (TQM)
- List of software engineering topics
- Computerized system validation