“If you don't have time to do it right, you need to have time to do it again.” – John Wooden, American basketball player and head coach of UCLA. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay "Give them quality. That's the best kind of advertising. - Milton Hersey, 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 what to expect different results." Einstein “If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.” - Maslow “What is measured improves” ― Peter F. Drucker “Quality is more important than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles.” Steve Jobs Co-founder, President and CEO of Apple Inc. Major investor and CEO by Pixar Founder and CEO of NeXT "Quality is everyone's responsibility." W. Edwards DemingThe 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”. to provide customers with goods and services of adequate quality Documentation Training Inspection Traceability Monitoring Reporting Improvement Corrections Regulatory bodiesQA is also: Continuous improvement; Increased value through new products and services; Reduction of errors, defects, waste and costs; Increased productivity. and effectiveness; Improved responsiveness and cycle time performance; Quality can mean the difference between excellence and disaster; customer-based organizations; understand the needs of internal and external customers and strive to exceed them. Customer Expectations Your customers expect you to provide quality products. If not, they will quickly look for alternatives. Quality is essential to satisfy your customers and retain them so that they continue to buy from you in the future. Quality products make an important contribution to revenues and long-term profitability. They also allow you to charge and maintain higher prices. Costs Poor quality increases costs. If you don't have an effective quality control system, you may have to pay the cost of analyzing non-conforming goods or services to determine the root causes and retesting the products after reworking them. In some cases, you may need to dispose of defective products and incur additional manufacturing 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 failing to meet customer or industry standards. Meet internal and external customer requirements. Increase productivity. Cost and time savings. Gives you the ability to fix your error "Reduces big errors" Machines for uptime and downtime. Increase in revenue. Increase in customers. Quality Assurance: Consistency, Efficiency and Productivity Let's approach 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 put, quality assurance means ensuring quality. In our personal and work lives, we all have excellent tasks, procedures and processes that are not done correctly – as specified – every time. Quality assurance means ensuring that tasks, procedures and processes are performed exactly as intended every time. Quality assurance seems simple. Let me assure you; it isn't. We go to training meetings, read materials, talk to our colleagues, study our owndocuments, we hire consultants and we rely on our experiences in deciding what inputs to use, procedures to follow and, in general, we make decisions to maximize or optimize productivity, efficiency and profitability. The available resources and these decisions establish an unknown but real maximum potential outcome. Whenever these decisions are not implemented exactly as specified, performance will drop below that potential. Let's look at some examples: Given our knowledge/skills/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 waste time because we haven't prioritized properly, don't work on a task that someone else should be doing, or continue 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 the guarantee of quality. Probably the most common example of quality assurance on dairy farms is correct milking procedure. We can, for example, look at it specifically in terms of somatic cell count (SCC). A lot of effort has gone into putting together a detailed milking procedure. This procedure and the physical layout of the implant once again determine that unknown but real potential – in this case, the level of the SCC. Every time that procedure is not followed exactly it reduces the probability of reaching that potential, resulting in an increase in SCC. The milking procedure is a great example of quality assurance. Why is quality assurance important? Quality assurance is necessary to enable success. It's not something that's necessary because people are stupid or unmotivated; it is necessary to achieve the excellence necessary to move to the next new level of management. Let me share a personal example of quality assurance. I'm a huge fan of the University of Minnesota women's hockey team. For several years I have been responsible for post-match receptions for members of the team's fan club. I had to plan these receptions three or four times a year. I initially developed a checklist that I use for every reception. Did I develop the checklist because I don't know what to do, am I unmotivated or stupid? NO! I developed it and use it for two reasons: to make sure I don't forget one or two of the many details and therefore don't have to waste time remembering everything and going back to do things I overlooked. The checklist is a quality assurance tool that allows me to have everything ready for each 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 achieving this new and 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 must also explicitly design a quality assurance program to ensure that the potential is achieved. In agriculture, we too often refer to all quality assurance as the development of SOPs (standard operating procedures). SOPs are necessary for quality assurance in situations, such as 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.