Operations - quality

Question 1

Importance of quality

Answer 1

• poor quality leads to customers returning which causes loss in sales
• extremely low quality doesn’t meet safety standards and causes bad PR
• high quality causes good reputation
• high quality attracts high quality staff
• highest quality allows premium prices

Question 2

Quality control - advantages and disadvantages

Answer 2

+ ensures faulty goods not sent
+ limits potential for bad reputation
- creates waste as not checked until end and thrown away
- reworked from scratch, time and money

Question 3

Quality assurance - advantages and disadvantages

Answer 3

+ less wastage, decreases cost on discarded materials
+ easy to identify where faults in production lie
- can slow production time down
- increases cost of production, QA managers wages

Question 4

Benchmarking - advantages and disadvantages

Answer 4

+ of successful, product will be best on market
+ saves business time developing own approach
- difficult to gain info about organisations quality methods
- business only be ‘as good’ never better

Question 5

Quality circles - advantages and disadvantages

Answer 5

+ employees motivated as say in decision making
+ management get well-informed suggestions from workers
- employees meet during paid company time, production lost
- employees trained to join quality circle, costing business

Question 6

Difference between quality control methods (inspection) and quality assurance methods (prevention)

Answer 6

• quality control involves checking at end of production whereas quality inspection checks at end of each stage of production
• quality inspection reduces waste as products can be discarded as soon as soon as mistake
• quality inspection more expensive as QA manager needed at each stage of production
• quality inspection more time consuming as longer to move through stage of production