“Quality is not an act. It is a habit” – This saying by Aristotle holds good for everything and is applicable everywhere. Starting from a street food vendor to a clothes merchant, and vegetable seller until the complex manufacturing process, Quality is what is required in every business to attain customer satisfaction and to build reliability. Any business that adopts the best practices and meets the regulations of a quality standard gets a direct competitive advantage.

Quality Standards for Manufacturing Industry

Quality can be an ambiguous concept at first because what one perceives as quality someone else may not. Hence, the need and purpose of quality standards are central and essential. Clearly defined quality standards make it easier for organizations to meet what the industry and their customers consider “quality” and work on achieving the set quality goal.

Specific quality standards are designed for specific market segments to ensure organizations meet the required industry requirements. Formerly, organizations used to struggle with the concepts of quality standards and professed it as a complex system. Currently, with a lot of information and guidance there is an understanding of how these quality standards can benefit them.

The manufacturing industry follows a number of quality standards based on the business and the industry.

To name a few are:

ISO 9000 and 9001: Quality standards for Organizational Excellence

AS 9100: Quality standard for Aviation and Defence

ISO 13485: Quality standard for Medical Device Manufacturing

ISO 14001 and 18001: Quality standards for Environmental, Health and Safety Management

ISO 27001: Quality standard for Information Security Management

ISO 16949: Quality standard for the Automotive Industry

All the quality standards are framed based on the fundamental seven principles – Customer Focus, Leadership, Engagement of People, Process Approach, Improvement, Evidence-based Decision-making, and Relationship Management. This includes many processes such as: Understanding the context of the organization, the role of leadership in establishing quality policy and creating a culture of customer focus, planning, evaluating and providing resources, managing communication and documentation, designing, supply chain, producing, delivering, managing non-conforming product or service, process improvement, performance evaluation, internal audits and management reviews.

The intent of Quality Standards

The intent of following quality standards in the manufacturing industry is well understood that it is not just about profit and loss but it is mainly concerned about safety, delivering quality products, and meeting customer expectations.

Some of the benefits of complying with quality standards for the manufacturing industry are:

• Enhanced customer satisfaction

An organization with an established quality standard process naturally embeds a culture of achieving business excellence by reducing errors, saving operational costs and manufacturing high-quality products, thus ensuring higher customer satisfaction.

• Operational Excellence

Quality standard aids in assessing the manufacturing processes, identifying issues and process mistakes, as well as finding ways to immediately resolve them, resulting in an increase in the efficiency of manufacturing processes.

• Documentation Control

Documentation control accurately recognizes all the manufacturing processes, traceability of the products and creates greater accountability in the employees.

• Continuous Improvement

Implementing quality standards encourages continuous improvement and innovative ways to exceed the quality expectations of the customers, and helps to discover new scopes to effectively use the resources, eliminate redundant tasks, increase productivity and ensure a seamless flow of operations.

• Better Prices for Customers

Quality products and reduced process variation along with the best production prices will always delight the customers. With quality assurance practices implemented at every stage of the manufacturing process, chances of errors or reworks reduce significantly which cuts down the production costs.  

• Improved worker productivity and safety

Enforcing and monitoring quality standards in an organization improves the productivity of the employees as well as sets a procedure to ensure their safety at the workplace.

Final Thoughts: Quality standards as a formula for success

There is no shortcut to becoming number one. The essence of success is to do qualitative things thoroughly and throughout the organization from the top down. It is important for the organization to know and understand the industry requirements and recognize the specific quality standard, which will help the organization to stand out in the industry. Quality standards serve as a framework, but it is the responsibility of the leadership team along with their employees to lay the floor and build upon it to reach the primary goals of continually improving the quality, cost, production time, flexibility and customer service.