What is a quality assurance audit checklist?
A quality assurance audit evaluates and improves a company’s procedures to ensure that desired results are achieved. It focuses on improving processes and methods for product development in industries like manufacturing, information and technology, call centers, food, transportation and logistics, pharmaceutical, etc.
Even with quality controls performed regularly, some problems can slip through the cracks to the frustration of the customer. That’s why quality assurance audits are the perfect tool to use in order toidentify problem areas and improve standards.
These audits can be done efficiently with a quality assurance checklist, consisting of questions pertaining to your industry. A comprehensive checklist offers you space to write comments, view answers, and indicate errors.
Table of contents
1. What should you include in a quality assurance checklist?
2. What are some quality assurance techniques and tools?
2.1. The six tools of quality assurance
3. The benefits of a digital quality assurance audit checklist
What should you include in a quality assurance audit checklist?
The organization of yourquality assurance inspection report template depends on the size of your company, the products and services being evaluated, and company processes. Quality assurance is all about preventing defects. Fixing mistakes after the fact can cost companies large amounts of money, so it’s important to identify problems in time and before manufacturing starts.
Remember to include all employees involved in the audit. You can’t successfully implement improvement in processes, standards, and methods unless all affected employees know what’s changing.
A production quality assurance checklist needs to cover a lot of tasks, which include:
- Project planning, tracking, and monitoring
- Design processes
- Acceptance testing
- Release processes
- Corrective action processes
- Certification processes
- Non-deliverable products
- Processes for storage and transportation
- Risk management processes
- Employee capabilities and requirements
This isn’t a complete list of areas covered in a quality assurance audit checklist, but it’s a good starting point. In the service sector, you would not have as many tasks to audit, but each would be addressed in great detail.
Considering the scope of these checklists, it’s always worthwhile to set up a timeline for quality assurance activities— especially when conducting project-related quality assurance.
What are some quality assurance techniques and tools?
No quality assurance checklist will work unless the right techniques and tools are established and applied. The two basic techniques of quality assurance auditing are:
- Defining processes and standards
In addition to guiding you through an inspection process, checklists help you define what proper processes and standards look like. The organizational standards included in these checklists should be defined by professionals, as they form the basis of quality assurance and ensure the development of reliable, high-quality products and services. - Conducting quality audits
A quality audit examines and evaluates work products. It checks whether standards, policies, regulations, plans, and procedures are being followed. Quality assurance audits are a systematic approach to instituting required procedures and standards.
The six tools of quality assurance
Every quality assurance program needs to include these six things:
- Cost-benefit analysis
Cost-benefit analyses are how businesses evaluate an investment against its expected benefits.They determine whether investments are feasible, accounting for labor, time, and cost savings. - cause and effect diagram
The cause-effect diagram (also called the “Fishbone” or “Ishikawa” diagram) combines the techniques of brainstorming with mind mapping. It’s meant to help you find the root cause of a problem, so you can find the appropriate solution. - Control diagram
Control charts are used to analyze performance trends over time. A control diagram determines whether fundamental changes need to be made to avoid potential or reoccurring problems. - Quality costs
There are two types of quality costs. The first type are costs that arise from failure to meet industry requirements. The second type of cost is money invested in preventative measures, such as assessments and testing, to avoid product delays and noncompliance. - Benchmarking
Benchmarking is the process of measuring performance against standard metrics and practices. - Test runs
Test runs are conducted under controlled conditions to uncover relationships between factors that influence a process (inputs) and their corresponding outputs.
The benefits of a digital quality assurance audit checklist
Successful companies, regardless of their product or service, focus on quality, which means investing in the right quality assurance resources. Using a digital checklist for quality assurance and saying goodbye to pen and paper helps you maintain and enforce standards more easily.
By using Lumiform’s versatile mobile app and desktop software for inspections and audits, your organization can:
- Easily create quality assurance checklists with the form builder and customize them at any time with just a few clicks.
- Access over 12,000 templates in the template library, and start using them right away.
- Design multiple-choice, checkbox, yes/no, or long and short text questions to ensure you can collect any type of data necessary.
- Add photos and annotations to your audits, as context and evidence.
- Assign and prioritize corrective actions from the app so incidents are addressed and fixed in order of urgency. You can also set fields to automatically assign tasks to specific employees and alert you when they are done.
- Automatically generate reports which help immediately share information with relevant stakeholders and employees, improving visibility across the organization.
- Perform extensive analyses to identify areas that need your attention early and continuously optimize processes.
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