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Quality Management

Best Practices Mini-Assessment

Great companies employ a variety of quality management practices to ensure that their products and processes satisfy customer requirements and are the best that they can be. How does your company compare against the best? Take our mini-assessment to find out!

  • My company has an up-to-date quality manual that clearly defines the processes, procedures, and
    resources that assure the quality of our products and processes.
  • My company has a formal quality assurance program that uses quantitative (statistical) methods,
    SPC, gage R&R studies, benchmarking, quality function deployment, etc. to analyze products and
    processes.
  • We track and analyze our scrap and rework on an ongoing basis.
  • We track, report, and communicate "costs of poor quality" to everyone in the company on a regular
    and ongoing basis.
  • We track the proportion of customer returns and analyze the reasons for them.
  • We track warranty costs and analyze the reasons for warranty claims.
  • We track and analyze defects on items and materials purchased from our suppliers.
  • Poor quality of incoming materials affects our plant productivity.
  • We have a corrective and preventive action program and use it to monitor and improve the quality
    of our products, processes, suppliers, and customer satisfaction.
  • We have a company quality policy and, if asked, any employee can state what it is.
  • Product returns due to damage during shipping are a problem for us.
  • We have measurable, time-based quality objectives set on a regular basis by the management of our
    company.
  • We provide regular, formal training and refresher training for all employees on quality concepts,
    standards of quality, and workmanship.
  • We are a customer-focused company, and everyone strives to continuously improve all that we do to
    better serve our customers' needs.
  • We develop and maintain quality plans for the overall organization or for specific products and
    regularly report results to senior management.
  • We use poke-yoke methods and operator self-inspection or "quality-at-the-source" in all of our
    operations.
  • We use formal methods for handling, tracking, and reporting of non-conforming or defective parts
    and/or products.
  • We use an internal auditing program for monitoring the effectiveness of our systems and processes,
    and the results are regularly and formally reported to management.
  • Quality management is a strategic business initiative and is "part-and-parcel" of our operating or
    business plan.
  • Executive and/or senior management defines and documents the company's commitment to quality
    with respect to elements such as fitness for use, safety, performance, and dependability of our
    products.


Assessment courtesy of our NIST/MEP partner, the GENEDGE Alliance.

Purdue University's Technical Assistance Program is the Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) center for the State of Indiana.