Two terms you likely hear over and over again as a project manager, supervisor or team leader are “quality control” and “continuous improvement.” You can apply these broad concepts without fail to any industry, project or situation.
When you apply and use them correctly, they will become second nature, simplifying and improving the way you work.? However, if you don’t understand their significance, or you stay at their broad definitions and don’t dig deeper to find concrete, measurable ways of applying quality control and continuous improvement to your business, you won’t benefit fully.
Learning the difference between quality control and continuous improvement is essential, even if you already use these terms and concepts. These terms have become so common over the past decade that, in some cases, they have lost their impact and are seen as slogans, not useful day-to-day tools. Once you understand the major and nuanced differences between quality control and continuous improvement, you will see them as two very powerful approaches to running a leaner and more efficient business with measurably higher quality.
Competition is fierce, not only from traditional competitors but also from new, innovative products and services that are rewriting the rules of how business is done.
If you can’t supply quality to your customers in terms of product, service, delay, reliability, etc., they are going to find it elsewhere. The very first step is to stop looking at quality as a weight to carry and, instead, seeing it as one of your major strong points.
This adversarial view of quality stems from the push decades ago to add quality after the fact. When the big wave of quality tools — such as Lean Manufacturing, Kaizen, 5S and Kanban — and concepts rose to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s, they were often grafted onto existing processes, tools and methods, making them cumbersome and burdensome.
Quality was viewed as an extra operation, step or layer, and it added to everyone’s workload. If you are an experienced manager who saw the addition of a quality function or department in your business decades ago, you will recall how disruptive it often was. Those of you who are just starting your careers likely didn’t experience this change and always knew quality as an integral part of how you work.
That concept of integration is key. You need to view quality as an integral part of everything you do. The Southeast Asian country of Indonesia has many unique languages, but many of them do not have a word for religion. This is because, for many Indonesians, religion is non-dissociable from everyday life. The concept of life without religion doesn’t exist, so there was never the need to create a word for it.
This is how you should view quality in your organization, department or service. Of course, the word quality exists, but you can’t see it as something that is in addition to or grafted onto your products, processes or services.
If you are responsible for an area of your business that is lacking in terms of quality, you will see much greater results if you work to integrate any new concepts and methods into the workflow — not treat quality as a unique step to be performed in a bubble.
The Beginnings of Quality
The actual concept or understanding of quality goes back a very long time, but it was sometime after the second World War that the idea of quality as we know it today started to spread across the United States. The generally recognized definition of quality includes the notion of being free from defects, deviations or significant variations and responding to an initial intent or planned result.
When quality was first being studied, the focus was primarily on detecting anomalies and removing them from circulation. This involved thorough inspection or measurement of the process or product in question. An early quality inspection was deemed successful if it captured 100 percent of the non-conforming parts.
The problem with this tunnel-vision view of quality is, since it lacks integration, detection of an anomaly does not directly communicate upstream to the source of the anomaly and modify or correct it. One example that dates from WW2 highlights the problem well.
Analyzing these causes allows us to go back to before the errors were made and either remove or correct them. That is the control portion of quality control. With measurements, tracking and process control, nowadays we can automate this loop and have real-time corrections to our processes to eliminate errors as soon as we detect them.
With modern quality control, we can even go a step further and anticipate the drifting of a process, making corrections to avoid defects and errors before they happen. Statistical analysis and computer-aided simulations give us the information we need to maintain strict control over our systems and processes. So if you are searching quality control jobs visit
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