Larry Webber

Without quality control, your organization can't survive for long. Successfully implementing, maintaining, and evaluating quality control standards is critical whether you're seeking ISO certification or just keeping up with customer needs. When implementing a quality control process, you'll likely face resistance from people within the organization.

Meeting ISO (International Organization for Standardization) quality standards ensures customers that you'll provide quality product. ISO standards are the most recognized quality standards — after all, the organization's members consist of the national standards organizations of 150 countries. Follow these ISO quality standards, which provide a common language for companies to trade across the globe: Get commitment from top management to ensure success.

The Theory of Constraints (TOC) is a comprehensive technique for identifying and managing an organization's constraints for obtaining maximum output from a process (or throughput). The TOC says that a traditional approach of optimizing individual processes only occasionally helps throughput. For years, companies have spent large amounts of money to improve their processes.

Your organization can implement several fundamental quality control processes to ensure that you produce or deliver a high-quality product or service. The following sections present the information you need to determine how you can integrate quality control processes into your organization. Introducing quality control to your business The introduction of a quality control process into an organization can be a major shock to its system.

Lean processes are the latest diet craze in the world of quality control! Lean is a quality control technique you can use to identify and eliminate the flab in your company's processes. The "flab" is all the dead weight carried by a process without adding any value. The customer doesn't want to pay for dead weight, so why should you?

All business processes start out operating perfectly (that's the plan, anyway). Over time, however, things change. Gradually, a simple process becomes more complex, and this complexity can breed inefficiency. Rapid Improvement Events aim to identify and remove the "extra" from processes and return them to efficiency.

Many people in the organization will see the introduction of a quality control process as an unwelcome change. Overcoming reluctance to a new quality control process calls for clear and consistent communication, and a constant eye on the "big picture." Here are some tips on how to rally the support of the willing, ease the fears of the reluctant, and overcome the obstacles put up by the unwilling.

Customer feedback is one of the most important resources for improving an organization's quality control. If you're serious about quality control, you can't assume that you know what the customer wants, and you can't wait for them to tell you. Actively seeking customer input ensures that you know exactly what the customer wants, which is the only way to keep your organization in business.

Of course you expect your quality-control project to succeed, but things rarely go as smoothly as planned. Even the best-laid plans sometimes run into problems. Be ready for trouble and use the following tips to get your quality project back on track. Review your goals and focus on what's really important. Evaluate where your project stands — look at what you've achieved and where the project truly has problems.