Did you know the average cost of a product recall is around $12 million?
If you’re worried about losing a lot of money due to a product recall, you should implement a quality assurance (QA) protocol. Yet, if you’re just starting out, you may not know what QA is and how it can help you.
Read on, and you’ll learn about QA and why it’s vital for your business. If you want to keep product defects to a minimum, you’ll soon see how QA can help.
Quality Control vs. Assurance
It’s worth noting that QA is different from quality control, and this distinction is important.
Quality control is focused on specific parts of the product development and production process. For instance, with quality control, you might have someone on the end of a conveyor belt that looks out for damaged items.
However, QA is more holistic, as it aims to monitor and improve overall production standards.
For instance, if you put someone in charge of assurance, they’ll make sure the quality control people are doing their job. They’ll also work with suppliers to make sure they’re doing a good job in regards to quality control.
Furthermore, QA staff will work with regulators to ensure they’re happy with your company and its production standards.
How to Hire QA People
Your success with QA is going to come down to your ability to hire good staff. After all, if you don’t have good QA people, you can’t have a lot of confidence in your ability to maintain suitable QA protocols.
If you want to hire good QA people, you should look for people that have worked in the industry you’re hiring for. For instance, if you work in the food industry, you should hire FSQA professionals.
Before you hire someone for a QA role, you might want to think about giving them a quiz. In this quiz, you might have some questions about the QA rules associated with your industry.
You can then use the results of this quiz to determine if someone is a good hire. At the very least, this quiz will tell you how much training you’ll need to give a potential QA employee before you give them some autonomy.
If you don’t know how to create this quiz, there are companies that’ll help you create employee QA tests.
Many of these companies will provide you with an online testing portal that you can direct people to. This portal will manage the assessment process, and it will catalog everyone’s results.
Will You Produce Defective Products?
If you want to keep defective products to a minimum, you should pay a lot of attention to the quality assurance side of your business.
In some cases, spending money on QA tasks might not seem like a good idea, as this money doesn’t lead to a direct return on investment. However, if you want to avoid a situation wherein you have to recall thousands of products, investing in this area is definitely money well spent.
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