Everybody expects the best quality from the products that they purchase. Quality assurance (QA) is a method of preventing mistakes.
Inspection and auditing are two elements of QA with each playing a separate but important role. QA also requires policy and process changes, not to mention a dedication to documentation.
According to the ISO 9001 standard:
“QA is a part of quality management focused on providing confidence that quality requirements will be fulfilled”.
QA Standards
Standards are the best way of satisfying customer requirements. Quality assurance standards are a set of rules.
These rules are universal to the industries they apply to. This ensures that each industry has the same measurements and guidelines to follow.
Proper documentation is the first step to meet the QA standards. Fulfilling QA standards by itself does not guarantee that a product will be fit for purpose.
The Benefits of Quality Assurance
Quality Assurance involves well-defined steps in its process cycle. There are several benefits of quality assurance.
By ensuring that staff at all levels of an organization understand the reason for quality, motivation improves.
QA can also nullify the gap between the managers and workers, as this eliminates the feeling of being monitored. It is key to have staff involved in the process. When they know that monitoring is to improve a product, and not to find fault, that is something they can get behind.
QA ensures products are manufactured to a specific guideline. QA achieves this by various means of inspection and checking at every stage. QA also helps to identify problem areas where additional training can rectify a larger issue.
Some examples of this are:
- QA can focus on a training gap where staff do not have the right skills or knowledge.
- QA can also identify gaps in the product itself. This could be where the product does not work as expected, or it is not meeting customer needs.
Quality Management Systems
Most of the equipment failures occur due to small-scale failures. These failures often manifest due to maintenance issues.
The most critical periods of the equipment are the installation and commissioning periods. Proper commissioning and installation ensure that the equipment will work at maximum efficiency.
Inspections conducted during installation and a regularly defined schedule post install, help ensure that equipment works as expected. In addition, regular inspections extend the lifespan and ROI of equipment.
Information obtained through the process needs to be logged in a quality management system. This lets the QA team have access to the data. It also ensures that inspectors are kept informed of any changes on an ongoing basis.
Activities in Quality Management
The quality management process has two types of activities that deal with defining the quality of the equipment. Quality assurance concerns the quality during initialization. Quality control deals with quality during the working process.
With the advent of modern quality control processes and tools, the management of quality has changed.
Historically, data needed to be manually analyzed for trends. Automation has changed and simplified this. Now, modern tools provide real time results to help identify issues.
Preventative Maintenance
Preventative maintenance is a necessity for running any modern business. Without preventative maintenance, achieving excellence is an impossible task.
Preventative maintenance decreases the pressure required in handling this process. This method saves the cost, improves efficiency, and provides more compliance.
Benefits of Effective Preventative Maintenance (PM)
Preventative maintenance provides a lot of advantages apart from simply improving productivity.
Preventative maintenance ensures the worker’s safety and helps save time. However, classical methods tend to fail at providing all the benefits that are expected. This is due to gross human errors, which end up at a large scale, depreciating the growth of the industry.
With modern techniques, you can use software for achieving a proper cadence in preventative maintenance. The software identifies potential problems. It provides a single source of data across multiple sites. It also improves the efficiency of inspections and maintenance.
Maintenance Management Software
Maintenance management can be a tiresome process for workers. It can also reduce the efficiency of the industry in some instances. Industries should opt for maintenance management software. This tends to solve various problems and improves the efficiency of the equipment.
Permanent collection of data enables an improved analysis of issues. With this analysis, organizations can better find the underlying root causes of issues. More importantly, the software allows companies to track a corrective action plan.
A corrective action plan is one portion of preventing problem recurrence. Another is the ability to analyze data across multiple sites. With proper documentation and data, trends can be determined, which helps businesses be more proactive in troubleshooting.
Maintenance management software ensures that data is entered correctly. This ensures that inspectors are looking for the right information. Continuous data monitoring lets the software analyze trends in real time.
Field Eagle as a Solution
Field Eagle offers a solution that meets the needs of high-risk organizations around the world. Many of these companies have operations in the Oil, Gas, Mining and Transportation sectors, often in remote areas. The Field Eagle package is based around a client-server model with the server remaining at the company HQ.
Templates can be preloaded to the Field Eagle inspection units. This ensures that inspectors are looking for issues in the right place.
Field Eagle gives inspectors and auditors in the field near real-time communication across sites. This lets businesses track trends regardless of location.
Field Eagle ensures that inspectors are reviewing sites based on the most current compliance regulations in operation.
Conclusion
To compete in the technological world, industries should improve their production and also reduce unnecessary expenditure. Issues often occur due to poor maintenance management and quality management.
With the advent of Field Eagle inspection software, you can realize vast benefits. The software helps to:
- Improve production,
- Provide improved analysis and reports
- Ensure safety, and
- Enable precise maintenance techniques.
Field Eagle helps businesses improve their productivity and efficiency. It is the right choice for companies looking to embrace quality.
