Improving product quality and reliability calls for improved inbound and outbound services activities within the company. Quality involves the level of acceptability of service of product through quality management (Oakland, 2003). Quality management incorporates the use of quality control systems to manage production processes to improve and maintain maximum customer satisfaction at the lowest overall cost to the company while at the same time improving the production process. Quality management entails quality planning, defect prevention (quality assurance), product inspection, and competence (quality control) and quality improvement. Therefore, this paper aims to discuss approaches that can be adopted by the company to improve product quality and reliability based on qualitative and quantitative data provided.
Part A
Question 1
Defects rates occur along the manufacturing process because of several factors, which may include poor design, poor installation instructions, improper maintenance of individual components, assembly error, lack of sufficient testing, and delivery damage (Pambreni et al., 2019). Based on the provided information, the medium-size company introduced the new product and based on its innovative features, and the product has been sold well in the market. The company lacks quality assurance personnel to help the organization determine the quality of its products, and this explains why there are significant defect rates because the product quality is only verified during the final inspection. There is a need for the company to improve its product quality. As the quality assurance specialist appointed to help the company improve its product quality, I would implement an action plan based on the cause and effect diagram, as shown below.