Quality management
For quality management there are severel stages. When bakers start to make a product, they test/ taste it themselves and once reasonably satisfied they let their closest peers evaluate the product. In a next step they will evolve this in a plan to get to the market. Initially the outer markers of such a product is registered: appearance, sizes, weights, etc. to make sure they ‘comply’ more or less to what you have made initially: this is what we call product inspection.
Production growth.
As production volumes might grow, the assortment does. As a result more and more staff is coming in to the company and the potential growth of failure costs become higher. Internally or externally (customer complaints, refunds, etc. Many organisations just simply talk it through and do not take upon more action. However research has shown that roughly 9% of the revenue is related to quality costs. The biggest two ‘eating’ this budget would be internal Failcosts and Prevention (this includes cleaning). Costs for product inspection and external failcost can be considered minimal. Assuming you comply with cleaning standards, regulations, etc. Not including major recall of production runs. Very often this stage comes with work instructions and procedures. Which are great steps but add a lot of administrative workload for those not into this.
If you start to organise quality as a set of inspections, controls, procedures. Where it starts to transcend production execution and starts to incorporate other parts of the company’s value chain. It starts to evolve to Quality management. This is often where companies start thinking of getting certain certifications: HACCP, BRC, IFS, etc. The attitude of the company and its staff will be vital for its continuation: will it be a ‘burden’ or will quality start to work for you?
As business owners and technologists we can facilitate you in this transition, on strategic, organisational and structural (procedures, instructions and controls) level. Interested?
Need to know more? Feel free to contact us!