Quality Plan Notes for CEM
Introduction:
A quality plan is a document, or several documents, that together specify quality standards, practices, resources, specifications, and the sequence of activities relevant to a particular product, service, project, or contract. Present development in the all fields of people activities is connected with increased requirement for product quality. Totally essential influence on products quality belongs to quality planning. According to terminological standard of ISO 9000's standards family quality planning is defined as "part of quality management focused on setting quality objectives and specifying necessary operational processes and related resources to fulfill the quality objectives". Quality planning represents many of activities, which decide about resulting quality.
For example these partial activities are included in quality planning:
- Quality objectives identification and their development in organization.
- Product quality characteristics planning (the development of products, Which meet customer and other stakeholder) reguirements.
- Quality plan processing.
- Planning of methods, which will be used for achievement of required product quality.
- Processes quality planning (the development of products, which will be able to assure required product quality and their capability verification).
- Preventive of ways of product and process quality measurement and monitoring.
- Measurement systems planning and their suitability verification.
- Planning of data collection and needed quality records, etc...
At the highest level, quality goals and plans should be integrated with overall strategic plans of the organization. As organizational objectives and plans are deployed throughout the organizational, each function fashions its own best way for contributing to the top-level goals and objectives.
At lower levels, the quality plan assumes the role of an actionable plan. Such plans may take many different forms depending on the outcome they are to produce. Quality plans may also be represented by more than one type of document to produce a given outcome.
An example of this is a manufacturing company that machines metal parts. Its quality plan consists of applicable procedures (describing the production process and responsibilities), applicable workmanship standards, the measurement tolerances acceptable, the description of the material standards, and so forth. These may all be separate documents.
An operational-level quality plan translates the customer requirements (the what) into actions required to produce the desired outcome (the how) and couples this applicable procedures, standards, practices, and protocols to specify what is needed , who will do it, and how it will be done. A control plan may specify product tolerances, testing parameters, and acceptance criteria. While the terminology may differ, the basic approach is similar for service and other types of organizations.
Quality planning is realized especially in pre-production phases. Activities in these phases decide about customer satisfaction, product competitiveness and organization profit. While in the past production phase was regarded as key phase for product quality, at present it is generally recognized, that pre-production phases contribute to final product quality approximately by eighty percent. This state is considerably influenced by the increasing complexity of present products and used technologies, competitive market conditions and enhanced customer requirements.
