How to Define Quality Assurance

By: Courtney Ramirez

Knowing how to define quality assurance is an important part of bringing a product to market. Quality assurance is the process of making sure that a product meets the consumers' expectations. Through quality assurance, employees of a company can be sure that they are bringing the best product they can to the market. This process allows employees to evaluate new products and even improve upon previously existing products.

How does a company use quality assurance?
Quality assurance can be used when developing new products or evaluating the quality of an old product. Rather than just surveying the customers and seeing what works, quality assurance uses a specific set of guidelines to establish the rules for evaluation, evaluate the product and use the results of the evaluation. The result is a streamlined approach to perfecting a product.

What is PDCA?
A few different methods help implement quality assurance monitoring, but the most popular is the Shewhart Cycle, which was developed by Walter A. Shewhart and W. Edwards Deming. This cycle has four different steps, which are abbreviated PDCA. They stand for Plan, Do, Check and Act.

In the "plan" step, the company's employees will lay out their goals for the product. They will establish what objectives they have and how they will meet them. The planning includes evaluating the suppliers to make sure that the materials they use will meet their goal.

In the "do" step, the employees will implement the procedures they established in the first step. They will use the processes they planned out, and they will use the suppliers that they decided on. The product will be manufactured.

The "check" step is where the testing comes in. The created product will be evaluated to see how well it matches the initial objectives set out in the planning stage. Sometimes this will consist of in-house safety testing. Other times this step will be composed of market research or customer surveys. Basically, the company will be gathering feedback from a variety of sources on the efficiency of the product.

Finally, in the "act" step, the company will decide what steps need to be taken in the next generation of the product. At the end of this cycle, the process starts again with a new set of objectives.

What is the effect of quality assurance?
Quality assurance testing is a vital part of any company's production plan. The result is that the employees create the best product that they can in order to meet their standards and the expectations of their customers.

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