SEPTEMBER 20198WHAT DRIVES YOUR PRODUCT QUALITY? CONTROL OR ASSURANCE?By Saurabh Lal, Director Supply Chain, India & South Asia, Kellogg CompanyMr. Lal brings over 20 years of rich supply chain experience, and has successfully led large teams as well as multiple production and warehousing sites across industriesIN MY OPINIONost manufacturing organizations today have a department known as Quality As-surance. The question we are considering is ­ does QA assure quality or spends more time checking and controlling activities? A key element to ensure the quality of products is to build quality by design as well as defect pre-vention at every step of the manufacturing pro-cess. This results in fewer defectives, lower cost of production through less scrap as well as increased customer satisfaction. This, however, does not mean that quality control or Acceptable Quality Level (AQL) checks are redundant.For example, our plant was facing issues of flat packs in the marketplace. A controlled audit throughout the supply chain revealed higher lev-els of flat packs generated in the factory. The seal-ing design of the pack was changed and an hour-ly check introduced to test for seal integrity. This helped bring down ex-factory defects to <0.5%. Coupled with supply chain SOPs, overall defects were brought under control. Therefore, QC helped ensure packs were produced within design pa-rameters, while QA brought in a new design and introduced controls to ensure the process was followed rigorously.Another example - We were facing high levels of quality rejects on the process lines - almost twice that of our sister plants. The production and the quality team would argue on whose fault it would be. It was a tough decision on whether we should examine every part of the process to identify and eliminate root causes. We could not afford the time required for this process since we were supposed MSaurabh Lal, Director Supply Chain
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