Quality assurance,
in its broadest sense, is any action taken to prevent quality problems
from occurring. In practice, this means devising systems for carrying
out tasks which directly affect product quality
To implement systems
for an organisation, you need to carry out three basic steps: first develop
the system; second, document it (this takes the form of policies, procedures,
and reference information); and third, inform, instruct, and train staff
to use it.
Quality assurance does not only apply to products.
Services, and even "non-production" activities such as administration
and sales, benefit from a quality assurance approach.
These
Standards exist because many large organisations will not buy from suppliers
who cannot give them assurance that they have systems which support quality.
These large organisations include Government Defense Departments, Health
Departments, car manufacturers such as Ford, Toyota, and General Motors,
and Aerospace companies such as Boeing and Lockheed.
Until the mid 1980's
these large organisations published their own standards or codes for suppliers
to follow, and their staff would audit supplier companies regularly to
make sure they followed the code. It was not unusual for a supplier to
be audited separately by a number of larger customers, all with their
own quality system codes. In some instances suppliers hosted 30 or 40
quality system audits a year from all their major customers. To reduce
the number of audits to which individual suppliers were subjected, the
International Organisation for Standards (ISO) published a series of standards
in 1987 known as ISO 9000. Most large purchasing organisations accepted
this worldwide standard and ceased to issue their own codes. They also
ceased carrying out their own audits and accepted the findings of independent
audit companies engaged by supplier companies to check their systems against
the ISO 9000 standards. This allowed supplier companies to reduce the
number of audits to two or three per yea