Decisions taken for Quality Control
Quality control is the procedure through which the business ensures that the equality of the product is improved and maintained and the errors related to the manufacturing processes are eliminated or reduced. Quality controls demands for a situation where the business is to create a circumstance where the employees as well as the management both struggle for perfection. This is achieved through creation of benchmark for the quality of product, providing training to the personnel and testing the products for checking the significant statistical variance. The major aspect for quality control is establishing the well-defined control on the procedures. These controls further assist in standardizing the reaction and production to the issues related to quality. It gives limited rooms for errors and specifies regarding which activities are to be allocated to which personnel. Therefore, the employees will not have to carry out work in which they are not adequately trained (Wetherill 2013).
Quality control is a crucial requirement for every organization. To establish a consistent quality control procedure, there must be a good marketing plan, vision and increased level of output to align with the requirement. If the shareholders, consumers and employees are not satisfied, then the management will have to back to the starting point. Various quality control decisions are there based on the nature of the business. These are:
Continuous improvement – training the employees is a fluid and ongoing procedures. Top level employees have an impact on the performance of the lower level employees. Therefore, delegation of work is an important strategy (Talk 2016).
Proofing of mistakes – mistake-proofing is an important strategy for the companies with higher production. If the pace of the production process is faster, it is more prone to the error caused by human. Through proofing of error regarding the manufacturing process, the company will be able to ensure high-volume of out and at the same time will ensure regarding the standard of the product
Customer feedback – where high standards are set for the products of the company, it never gives importance to the customer’s feedback. However, customer’s feedback plays important role in conducting the business. Conducting regular surveys and interview with some specific customers will assist the company in getting the customer’s feedback.
Though the control of quality is an important aspect for running the business successfully, the financial aspect of implementing the quality control shall also be taken into consideration. Efforts regarding ensuring the quality must be implemented with regard to the following factors:
- Poor performance
- Minimization of unnecessary costs
- Improving the quality of the products
- Considering the needs of the customers as well as the employees
Implementation of quality management will have great impact on the financial decision making procedures as it will involve the following cost in implementation:
- Training of employees – before implementation of the procedure, the employees shall be provided with proper training. The initial costs of trainings are regarded as the opportunity cost considering the cost of both the trainees and their trainers. These costs do not involve any cash outflow from the company rather it is a trade-off for the time of the product. Further, this cost involves the cost of training materials and the off-site activities that are used during the training period.
- Development of team – apart from the training cost, initially the cost is expenses towards the development of team. To assure that the team development costs were represented fully, the activity of team for each employee is included under the initial costs for implementation (Haimes 2015).
However, the implementations of quality control are beneficial in the following ways:
- Reducing the manufacturing cost – as the quality of the product will be improved and error will be minimised, the cost associated with the manufacturing procedures will be reduced. It will reduce the engagement of outside employees on temporary basis for completion of particular process.
- Reduction in the scrap of material – reduction of material scrap enables the company to establish a correlation among the output of a production line and contribution of the production team. The amounts that are saved through the efforts are immediately measured and it gives the employees immediate sense of ownership, accomplishment and value.
- Reduction of overhead cost – better knowledge of manufacturing process and quality benchmark will enable the employees to reduce the overhead cost through minimizing the labour costs and increasing the employee benefits.
Above mentioned all outcomes related to expenses and benefits have great impact on the financial outcomes of the company. Therefore, these factors shall be taken into consideration while planning for financial management (Burke 2013).
As the business grows and the process of quality control is implemented, there will be a point of time where the business will require to take a decision regarding the software it is using and present and any improvement or replacement is required for the software or not. The lack of correlation between the software can lead to inefficiencies and cause burden to the growth of the business. Using of the decision software will enable the organization to take their decision in reliable way and analyse the cost and benefit is clear way (Lewis 2016). Further, the employees engaged with the software to make decisions will only be responsible for taking decisions regarding the quality control aspect while others can concentrate on their own work. Though, the implementation of decision software will involve huge costs initially like purchase cost of the software, training cost of the employees who will be responsible for using the software and taking various decisions, the benefits that will arise from the software will surely exceed the cost (Mitra 2016).
The decisions for implementing the decision management software for quality control will be beneficial in the following manners:
- Influence the consciousness of quality: the crucial advantage that is derived through implementation of quality control is it encourages and develops the quality consciousness among the the employees that will be of great help in attaining the required level of quality for the product (Wagh et al. 2015).
- Satisfaction of the consumers: customers will be benefitted as they will be offered with better product quality which in turn, will increase their satisfaction level.
- Reduce the production cost: through carrying out proper control and effective operations and production processes, the cost of production is significantly reduced. Moreover, quality control checks the production of wastages and inferior products and thereby significantly reduces the cost of the production.
- Effective use of resources: quality control assures maximum usage of the available resources which in turn, minimise the production wastages and increase the efficiency level.
- Reduction of inspection cost: quality control enables to bring the economies in the inspection and significantly minimises the cost of inspection (Aksyutina et al. 2015).
- Increase of goodwill: through production of better quality items and increasing the satisfaction level of the customers through fulfilling their requirements, the quality control increases the goodwill of the organization in people’s mind. An organization with strong brand name can raise finance from market easily.
- Higher morale among employees: efficient system for quality control is of great help for increasing the employee’s morale and they think that they work in such an organization that produce higher quality products.
- Improved relation among employee and employer: quality control improves the working environment through increasing the employee’s morale that assures that a pleasant relation exist among the employee and employer which in turn will enable to solve the issues in better way (Munoz 2013).
- Increase in sales: quality control assures the production of better quality products that is significantly helpful in drawing more customers which in turn, increase the level of sales. It will be of great help to retain the existing customers and creating new customers for their product.
- Assist in fixation of price: through introduction of quality control, same kind of products with same quality is manufactured. This greatly assists in solving the issues regarding fixation of price (Goetsch and Davis 2014).
Taking into consideration the above mentioned discussion it is recommended that in some areas there is a scope for improving the procedures of financial decision making. Before implementation of the quality control and the decision management software they are suggested to take into consideration the following factors:
- Determine the present financial situation regarding whether the company is in a position to implement the quality control systems or not
- Before implementation, the management shall search and evaluate the alternatives hat may be more beneficial to the company.
- At the time of implementation the management must evaluate its financial goals and align the decision with the goals to evaluate whether it is matching their purposes or not.
References
Aksyutina, Y., Tietze-Jaensch, H., Guillaumin, F., Pinson, P. and Fast, I., 2015. The German product quality control of the compacted metallic nuclear waste. In Proc. WM2015 Conference, Phoenix, 2015, 15311 (No. FZJ-2016-01358). Nukleare Entsorgung und Reaktorsicherheit.
Burke, R., 2013. Project management: planning and control techniques. New Jersey, USA.
Goetsch, D.L. and Davis, S.B., 2014. Quality management for organizational excellence. Upper Saddle River, NJ: pearson.
Haimes, Y.Y., 2015. Risk modeling, assessment, and management. John Wiley & Sons.
Lewis, W.E., 2016. Software testing and continuous quality improvement. CRC press.
Mitra, A., 2016. Fundamentals of quality control and improvement. John Wiley & Sons.
Munoz, A.M. ed., 2013. Sensory evaluation in quality control. Springer Science & Business Media.
Talk, O.M., 2016. Operations management.
Wagh, D.G., Shahi, S., Ingle, D.M.T., Khadabadi, S. and Karva, R.G.G., 2015. Quality by design in product development: A review. Journal of Pharm Research, 5(05).
Wetherill, G.B., 2013. Sampling inspection and quality control (Vol. 129). Springer.