The Importance of Quality Assurance

Quality assurance is a process used to learn if your product or service is up to standards, and whether you are giving customers the kind of product or service that will keep them returning. The idea is to deliver a product or service that consistently keeps up a high quality. It’s a proactive approach where defects are detected before a product or service goes public. This is vital to customer satisfaction. When customers are happy, your company is in a much better position to do well.

How Quality Assurance Works

Quality assurance is a system intended to demonstrate to company leadership and to the public that a product or service is up to standards of quality, often set by industry or regulators. It is sometimes called quality control, although quality control has more to do with the product after it’s made. Quality control became commonplace in manufacturing in the 1920s to define and control the quality of products. In the 1950s, quality assurance became important in public health and public safety.

Today, quality assurance measures the standards that go into a product or service before it goes out to the public. Quality assurance uses auditors, sometimes independent and sometimes in-house, to evaluate the methods that go into making products and providing services. When a company has a good quality assurance team, that lets corporate management, customers, regulators and government officials know that a product or service meets quality requirements.

Why Companies Use Quality Assurance

Quality assurance should never be overlooked in order to finish a job in a hurry. The process lets you know if you are using your resources the way you should. You don’t want to cut corners with any part of your product’s quality. Cutting corners could result in lost client faith, shrinking profit margins and eventually, your company’s ability to attract talented employees. Good quality assurance procedures allow both company owners and employees to take pride in their work.

Benefits to Quality Assurance

Quality assurance helps a company meet its clients’ demands and expectations. High quality builds trust with your customers, which, in turn, makes you competitive in the market. It saves costs and fixes issues before problems become larger, and it helps to set and maintain quality standards by preventing problems to begin with. Investing in quality assurance is indispensable in many industries today. It is most effective when it’s in place from the start. When quality assurance is done right, it provides confidence, tests the product and lets companies market their products with few worries.

Managing Cost and Waste

Having quality assurance in place is especially helpful to small businesses. It allows them to reduce extra costs that come with retesting, replacing and reselling faulty goods. When customers aren’t satisfied with a company’s products, the backlash can damage the company’s reputation, and negatively affect future products and even the entire company. Quality assurance might also save a company money in legal expenses, especially if its product isn’t up to industry standards.

Creating and Managing a Team

If a specific employee is chosen to do quality assurance, look for someone with the ability to handle repetitive tasks, be perfection-driven and willing to look deep into the root of an issue. The effort should be well-organized, with requirements for each case specified clearly. Track progress regularly and provide the tools needed to do the job well.

Producing Products for Customers

If you think about it, each business process produces a product/service for a customer. Sometimes the customers are internal and sometimes the “product” is invisible, but they’re customers and products just the same. For example, the process of entering a purchase order into the ERP system produces a payable invoice. The process of updating prospect records in the CRM produces a reliable forecast for the VP of Sales. When you look at every process through this lens and identify both the product and the customer, the opportunity for quality assurance principles to be applied emerges. There might be “defects” everywhere we look!

Finding Defects

It is likely that both the people who are engaging in business processes and their customers can easily identify defects in both the process and the results. We can define a defect as anything that doesn’t go as it should in a process, even if the defect doesn’t reach the end customer. These are the things that drive front line employees crazy every day, yet often escape the notice of top-level management. Applying the idea of QA to processes elevates what may be seen as minor complaints to opportunities for improvement and defect reduction.

Culture of Quality

Thinking about the business in terms of quality assurance makes defect-free results everyone’s job. Ignoring problems or implementing work around that only serve to mask deeper issues becomes unacceptable as the culture embraces the quality mantra. Not only will this positively impact the targeted business processes, but ultimately, the goods and services provided to external customers will be delivered more profitably.

Sometimes positive change begins with a change of mindset. A shift to a holistic quality assurance mindset might be just what is needed to improve results for your business.