Quality Basics – Production and Operations Management
Quality management is thus an important long-term marketing strategy as well. Quality is more crucial for India so as to competer in global market so as to get brand loyalties across the globe. To make a dent on such a market, it might sometimes be necessary for our products to be one step better than the already established products of other advanced countries.
WHAT IS QUALITY?
One basic question needs to be answered: What is quality and who decides the quality should be?
1. Quality refers to the output of the product against the performance standard as commitment by the company to the end customer. The commitment may be explicit such as a written contract or it may be implicit in terms of the expectations of the average consumer of the product.
2. Quality is either a Written or non-written commitment to a known or unknown consumer in the market.
3. It is decision based on various marketing considerations, production constraints, manpower or personal constraints and equipment or technology constraints.
4. Once such a strategic decision regarding the quality is taken, it is the job of all functional managements, including the Production and Operations Manager, to see that such strategic objectives and goals are implemented. Quality implementation is also ‘total organization effort.’
STATISTICAL METHODS
Statistics and quantitative methods are helpful in the implementation of quality. Though these quantitative and statistical methods are not a panacea for the problems of quality implementation, they are nevertheless helpful in this implementation process.
There are three aspects of assuring quality:
• Assurance of incoming raw materials quality
• Assurance that proper processes are operating on the raw materials
• Assurance of the quality of the outgoing finished goods
Acceptance Sampling
The task of exercising control over the incoming raw materials and the outgoing finished goods usually called ‘Acceptance Sampling.’ Accepting or rejecting the supplier’s raw materials, and sending or not sending the finished goods out. This is why the control at the raw material and the finished goods point is called Acceptance Sampling. This is only one part of what is known as Statistical Quality Control.
Process Control
The control one exercises over the processes operating on the raw materials or the semi-finished goods is called Process Control.
Mass Production
Statistics is a science of averages, and therefore, statistical methods are useful for mass-production and mass-purchase or procurement of raw materials and mass shipment of the finished goods. The statistical method-depends on a large population for their accuracy and relevance, and of course. Being a science, of averages, these methods have their own special drawbacks (which we need not elaborate at this point).
Sampling
Since in all the statistical methods we shall be dealing with small samples from a large population, these statistical methods are of a great help in ensuring adequate quality for the total population or mass of products by checking only a few.
STATISTICAL PROCESS CONTROL
The premise in process control is that if the processes chemical reactions, mechanical working by men and or machines are operated within a tolerable range, the product produced will be of the desired quality. The objective of process control is to set a proper procedure to work or shape the raw materials into finished goods .
Process control is nothing but the monitoring of the various physical variables operating on the materials and the correction of the variables when they deviate from the previously established norms.
Variations
In statistics, anything that we do not understand or we are not capable of understanding is called ‘random.’ The variations which are inherent in nature to a particular process and which are random since they are not traceable to any particular cause are labelled to be due to ‘random causes’ or ‘chance cause.’
Monitoring the Process
We can control the process by (a) actually measuring the variables operating on the raw materials, or by (b) Measuring the characteristics of the output product.
Control Limits
Naturally, in exercising process control by monitoring the product from the processes, we should not exceed these specification limits. In fact, we should exercise control over the processes before the product quality goes beyond the specification limits.
Cost Aspects in Designing Control Limits
There is no point in worrying over every small variation in the output and wasting our efforts in rectifying the processes operating on the materials.
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