Importance of quality

Question 1

What is the importance of quality?

Answer 1

• poor-quality goods can result in customers returning their purchases causing a loss in sales.
• Extremely low quality can result in products not meeting safety standards, which can lead to bad PR.
• Conversely, high-quality goods can result in a good reputation.
• Being associated with quality production can attract high-quality staff.
• The highest-quality goods can be sold at premium prices.

Question 2

What are the methods of ensuring quality?

Answer 2

• Quality control
• Quality assurance
• Continual Improvement
• Quality Circles
• Quality Standards and Symbols
• Quality Management
• Mystery Shoppers
• Benchmarking

Question 3

What is quality control?

Answer 3

Quality control is the most basic method of ensuring quality. Quality control is a method of inspecting raw materials or finished goods to check they are of an acceptable standard and quality.

Question 4

What are the advantages of quality control?

Answer 4

• Ensures that faulty good are not sent to customers.
• Limits the potential for a bad reputation due to faulty products.

Question 5

What are the disadvantages of quality control?

Answer 5

• Can created a lot of waste as the quality of the good are not checked until they are made and have to be thrown away if they do not meet the quality standards.
• Products have to be reworked from scratch, costing the business time and money.

Question 6

What is quality assurance?

Answer 6

Quality assurance is a method of prevention, i.e. where products are checked to see that they are of high quality at different stages in the development and production process rather than just at the end.

Question 7

What are advantages of quality assurance?

Answer 7

• Less wastage, which decreases costs spend on discarded materials.
• Easy to identify where faults in the production process lie.

Question 8

What are the disadvantages of quality assurance?

Answer 8

• Can slow down production as many processes are inspected.
• Can increase the costs of production, e.g. paying QA managers wages.

Question 9

What is continual improvement (Kaizen)?

Answer 9

Organisations should always attempt to improve quality, even if it has met its objectives.

Question 10

What are the advantages of continual improvement?

Answer 10

• The business stays ahead of the competition.
• The business can react easily to changing external factors.

Question 11

What are the disadvantages of continual improvement?

Answer 11

• The business can have high staff development costs.
• Employees may feel under pressure to continually keep improving.

Question 12

What are quality circles?

Answer 12

A quality circle is another Japanese philosophy on how to improve quality and ensures efficiency. This involves a group of employees meeting with a line manager to discuss problems in the production process and how to solve them.

Question 13

What are the advantages of quality circles?

Answer 13

• Employees will be motivated as they get to have a say in decision-making.
• Management get well-informed suggestions from the workers who actually produce the product.

Question 14

What are the disadvantages of quality circles?

Answer 14

• Employees meet during paid company time, meaning production time is lost.
• Employees are often trained to join a quality circle, costing the business even more time and money.

Question 15

What is quality standards and symbols?

Answer 15

A quality standard or symbol proves that a product has met an agreed industry standard.

e.g. hotels meet the standards to achieve the ‘star’ rating, such as a 5-star hotel.