Quality planning: The key to meeting standards

What is quality planning?

Quality planning is an activity that determines goals and conditions, resources and measures to achieve product quality goals.

The tasks of quality planning are:

• Market research to determine market demand for products and services, thereby determining quality requirements, technical specifications of products and services and developing products and services.
• Define quality objectives and tasks.
• Transfer planning work to the next departments.

The role of quality planning is:

• Orient the organization towards the goal.
• Determine quality policies and procedures.
• Design the necessary process flow diagram.
• Define the operating objectives.
• Clearly define management and operation processes.
• Limit business risks.
• Pay attention to quality planning aspects.

Quality planning steps

Step 1: Build quality goals

To plan for quality, it is first necessary to define specific quality objectives for products and services, based on customer requirements and common industry standards.

Identify your target customers, including both internal and external customers.

Create a complete quality document that describes the quality requirements and standards of the goods. This document also specifies the principles, regulations, requirements and approvals related to quality.

Step 2: Identify customer needs

Understand customer needs and wants, quality requirements and other important aspects they care about, and assess the ability of the product/service to meet quality needs.

Step 3: Identify customer needs

Based on the identified needs, develop specific product or service features, characteristics, and requirements to satisfy specific customer requirements. This process may include reviewing industry standards, conducting market research, interviewing customers, and working with stakeholders.

Step 4: Develop your product or service

Identify quality objectives that must be achieved to satisfy customer and supplier expectations, and to achieve these objectives at the minimum combined cost.

Step 5: Develop a quality control process

In this step, the business needs to develop a product and service development process that satisfies the set quality goals. Activities in the production process include:

• Create a product development process: Identify the steps and processes required to produce or deliver a product or service that meets quality requirements. This includes identifying quality control steps, process monitoring, and quality assessment.
• Develop a process to produce the required product or service features: Ensure that the production or service delivery process is capable of delivering the appropriate features and quality characteristics to satisfy customer requirements.
• Division of quality control responsibilities: Identify and assign responsibilities to each department and individual involved in implementing quality control in the process.

Step 6: Detailed planning

Evaluate the feasibility of the process, demonstrating that the process can achieve the quality standard under operating conditions.

Demonstrate process viability: Conduct testing, inspection, and evaluation of quality process performance. Includes conducting tests, pilot testing, analyzing data, evaluating performance, and comparing with established quality requirements.

Ensure process compliance: Take steps to ensure that quality processes are followed and performed as intended. This may include performing quality control checks, periodic audits, performance evaluations, and other measures to improve the process.

Periodic review and improvement: Conduct periodic reviews of the effectiveness and efficiency of the quality process. Based on customer feedback, testing and evaluation results, the business will change and improve the process to ensure that quality objectives are achieved effectively and customer needs are satisfied.

Tools and indicators commonly used in the quality planning process

Tools used

There are many tools available to assist you in planning and managing quality. Here are a few popular tools:

• Planning Tools
  • Nominal Group Technique: This technique helps improve group decision making by improving communication and collaboration.
  • Force Field Analysis: This tool helps identify factors that impact and influence quality planning.
  • Brainstorming: This tool helps to generate new suggestions and improvements through group discussion.
  • Cost of Quality: This is a tool that helps identify the costs that affect improving the quality of a product or service.
  • Cost – Benefit Analysis: This tool allows calculating long-term benefits compared to current investment costs and project maintenance costs.

• Tools for Planning and Control
  • Scatter Plot, Pareto Chart, Gauge Chart, Control Chart: These tools help in collecting and analyzing data for making quality management decisions.
  • Check Sheet: This tool helps control data collection according to quality control procedures
  • Flowcharts: Scatter charts help describe each work process and how they interact with each other.
  • Cause and Effect Diagrams: This is a tool that helps analyze the main causes related to a specific problem.

Quality index

In quality management, there are a number of commonly used metrics to evaluate and control the quality of products and services. The three most important metrics include

• Product Quality Index (PQI): This is an index that evaluates the overall quality of a product, including criteria for accuracy, quality of raw materials and appearance.
• Service Quality Index (SQI): An index used to evaluate service quality, through indicators of response speed, service quality, and customer satisfaction.
• Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI): This is an index that evaluates customer satisfaction with products or services.