Quality Assurance Checklist

What is a quality assurance checklist?

Quality assurance evaluates and improves a company's procedures to ensure that desired results are achieved. It focuses on improving processes and methods for product development. Usually, comprehensive quality assurance audits are conducted for this purpose.

Even with quality controls performed as standard, some problems can slip through the cracks and get directly to the customer. Quality assurance audits are the perfect tool to identify these problem areas and improve standards in regular inspections. They can be used to uncover inefficient areas and errors.

An audit like this can be done efficiently and clearly with a quality assurance checklist. This format allows you to conduct a structured audit of all work areas through a suitable list of questions. At the same time, it offers you space for free answers and indications of errors if questions cannot be answered positively. With a QA inspection checklist in manufacturing or services you identify and fix problems faster.

This article provides information on the following topics:

1. Techniques and tools of quality assurance

2. Organizing a QA inspection checklist

3. A digital tool for quality assurance checklists

Quality assurance techniques and tools

No quality assurance checklist will work unless the right techniques and tools are established and applied. The following are the basic ones for you.

The two techniques of quality assurance

1. Defining processes and standards
   The characteristic feature of quality assurance is the definition of organizational processes and standards. The relevant process should serve as a guide and be improved over time. The organizational standards should be defined by professionals, as they form the basis for quality assurance and ensure the development of reliable, high-quality products and services.
2. Conducting quality audits
   A quality audit is a quality assurance method that examines and evaluates work products. It looks to see if standards, policies, regulations, plans, and procedures are being followed. It is a systematic approach to reviewing all required procedures and standards considered during product development and testing.

The Six Tools of Quality Assurance

You should consider and, at best, establish the following tools when establishing a quality assurance process in your organization:

1. Cost-Benefit Analysis
   Cost-benefit analysis is a systematic approach to evaluating an investment against its expected benefits. It is used to determine whether the investment is feasible in terms of labor, time, and cost savings.
2. Cause and Effect Diagram
   The cause-effect diagram (also called "Fishbone" or "Ishikawa" diagram) combines the techniques of brainstorming with mind mapping on a diagram. This is meant to force you to go to the root cause of a problem to find the right solution to it.
3. Control Diagram
   Control charts are used to analyze the performance trends of a process over time. This can be used to safely determine if fundamental changes need to be made to the process to avoid certain problems.
4. Quality costs
   There are two types of quality costs. The cost of poor quality arises from the failure to meet requirements and involves internal and external costs. On the other hand, good quality costs include the prevention costs of investing in assessments and testing.
5. Benchmarking
   Benchmarking is a process of measuring performance against standard metrics and practices.
6. Test runs
   This systematic approach, is conducted under controlled conditions to uncover relationships between factors that influence a process (inputs) to determine the output of the process.

How to organize a QA checklist?

How you organize your quality assurance checklist depends on the size of the company, the products and services being evaluated, and company processes, among other factors. Quality assurance is a preventive process because it's where you establish the methods that prevent defects. You also ensure that the right thing is done in the right way.

When you organize your quality assurance checklist, you should also remember to involve all employees involved in the processes. You can't successfully implement improvement in processes, standards, and methods if affected employee aren't involved or don't know about them.

A production quality assurance checklist usually needs to cover a lot of tasks, which include those listed below:

1. Identify standards and guidelines
2. Evaluate project planning, tracking, and monitoring processes
3. Evaluate design process
4. Evaluate acceptance testing
5. Evaluate release process
6. Evaluate corrective action process
7. Evaluate certification process
8. Evaluate non-deliverable products
9. Evaluate processes for storage and transportation
10. Evaluate risk management process
11. Evaluate capabilities of and requirements for employee

The task catalog does not claim to be complete, but it gives typical examples of task areas that need to be queried with a checklist on quality assurance in production. In the service sector, the range of tasks is usually not as extensive, but the individual task areas are addressed in great detail. Due to the scope of the areas to be evaluated, it is always worthwhile to set up a time schedule for the QA activities - especially if project-related quality assurance is carried out.

A digital tool for quality assurance checklists

Successful companies, regardless of their product or service, focus on quality. Promoting quality also means investing in the right quality assurance resources to consistently deliver the high level. For quality assurance checklists, that means saying goodbye to pen and paper and investing in a digital solution.

With Lumiform as a versatile mobile app and desktop software for inspections and audits, your organization can achieve and maintain the quality of its products and services by taking advantage of the following features for themselves:

• Easily create quality assurance checklists with the form builder and customize them at any time with drag-and-drop ease.
• Access an extensive selection of templates in the template library and start using them right away.
• Select answer types such as multiple choice, checkbox, yes/no, or long and short text answers in the quality assurance checklist to ensure you get the data you need and filter out the rest.
• Add photos and annotations during an audit or audit to make your results more descriptive.
• Assign corrective actions with priority levels from the app so incidents are addressed and fixed in order of urgency. You can also set automatic assignments to be triggered when certain conditions are met.
• Automatically generate reports so you can immediately share information with relevant stakeholders and employees, improving visibility across the organization.
• Perform extensive analysis to identify areas that need your attention early and continuously optimize processes.