The concept of quality - AQAConsequences of quality issues

If a product or service is of good quality, it means that it is of a high standard. Quality can come from how well a product is made, the use of high-quality raw materials, and ensuring that products will last a long time and work well, eg a watch should tell the time correctly. Post-sales service should also be of good quality, businesses should deal with faults quickly and efficiently. Quality can also be demonstrated through having clean and tidy facilities, or polite employees.

Customers often have high expectations about the quality of goods and services they receive. Customers expect to receive a product or service that performs as described and is of a reasonable quality. Many customers also expect products to be produced in an ethical and sustainable way.

Having a reputation for high quality goods and services is likely to lead to a higher chance of business success and business growth, providing them with a competitive advantage. Having a reputation for poor quality can have severe consequences, such as less customers and reduced business success.

Managing quality

Businesses have two ways of managing quality – quality control and quality assurance.

Quality control

Quality control is the process of inspecting products and services to ensure that what customers receive is of a high standard. There are many different ways that businesses conduct quality control. For example:

• Feedback can take the form of customer questionnaires, conducted either at the point of sale or electronically, to ask about the service customers received from the business.
• Factory inspectors are often used at the end of production to ensure that products are of the required standard before they reach customers. For example, car manufacturers have a list of checks that they complete before cars are sent out, eg doors must be correctly aligned, car mats must be present and there must be no visible flaws in the paint.

These methods reduce the number of faulty or sub-standard products that reach customers. However, a disadvantage is that these methods only identify faults at the end of production, when they may be more expensive to fix than if they were found immediately. This is because the whole product may need to be removed and rebuilt in order to fix the fault.

Quality assurance

Quality assurance is a process of carrying out quality checks at specific stages during the production process. This ensures that faults and sub-standard products are found sooner rather than at the end of the production process

Quality assurance makes quality the responsibility of the employees involved in the production process. This can mean that businesses need to develop a good business culture where the attitudes and behaviours of employees within the business ensure that they are focused on producing high-quality products. Businesses usually employ managers to oversee quality assurance. The managers also make employees aware of their quality responsibilities and what is expected of them. Quality assurance process can be expensive for businesses, and often the added costs are reflected in what customers are charged.