Your benefits with quality control

How does quality control reduce your risks?

• It pushes the factories to improve the quality level of their workmanship because of the pressure of inspections and non-acceptance.
• It forces your suppliers to meet your order terms and product requirements, or to compensate you for any discrepancy (exact materials, colors, aspect, packing...).
• You don´t discover quality problems after the goods are delivered. You have the time to adapt your planning and take decisions. The factory can rework the goods itself, and will be more careful in the future.
• Over the long term, regular inspections and feedback about quality contribute to improving your suppliers reliability.

So quality control is a form of insurance. Most of the time it only represents about 1-2% of the FOB value of the goods at stake.

Are you afraid of bothering the factory, and disrupting their operations? You can do an in-line inspection. It might actually save them from the pain of reworking defective goods at the last moment.

Conclusion: tell your suppliers they will be controlled, and control them!

Proven standards for higher reliability

The ISO 2859 standard

We use the ISO 2859-1 (1999) standard for our QC inspections. It is directly derived from MIL-STD 105E, and it is ISO´s equivalent to the ANSI/ASQ Z1.4-2003 standard.

The ISO 2859 standard aims at reducing the risks of non-quality for customers, and at optimizing the checking process. It provides a recognized method to accept or reject a production lot by inspecting a sample. Checking only a sample is much more efficient in time and cost.

The ISO2859 standard also contains guidelines to help drawing a sample that is as representative as possible of the whole lot.

The ISO 2859 master tables

How does it work? Let´s take an example: a lot contains 6,000pcs, and the inspection level is normal. Therefore the corresponding letter is L and the sample has to contain 200pcs.

You set the highest acceptable proportions of major and minor defects at 2.5% and 4.0%. So the lot is accepted ONLY if there is less than 11 major defects AND less than 15 minor defects.

Sample size code letters:	Single sampling plans for normal (level 2) inspection:

Conclusion: quality control is reliable and efficient when based on sound procedures.

Best practices

There are only six ways to deal with errors/defects. They can be either prevented or corrected, and they fall into three broad categories: development, production, and delivery.

The 6 ways to deal with errors

The 1-10-100 rule

Many studies across all industries have demonstrated that there is a cost and time ratio for development:production:delivery of 1:10:100.

It means each error will cost 10 times more (in dollars and in time) to fix in production than it would to fix in development, and 100 times more if the error actually reaches the customer.

Do it right the first time!

An essential principle of quality management is: “the sooner we eliminate errors, the better”. It often saves lots of time and money.

That´s why Sofeast proposes audits, early reviews and inspections during production.

Conclusion: address quality issues before they arise!