Quality Assurance Metrics

Quality assurance metrics are quality objectives. They mean the same thing. ISO 9001 standard requires that you establish quality objectives.

Quality Objectives Must Be

• measurable
• Relate to your business products
• documented
• reviewed
• tracked
  

Quality Objectives Documentation

Your quality objective documentation should

• Tell specifically what you are measuring
• State how you collect the data.
• The frequency of the measurement
• Provide targeted goals
• State who is responsible for gathering the data
• State how they are recorded.
• State when they are reviewed

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Quality Objective examples

Examples of Quality Objectives:

• Percent yield for a product
• Cycle time for a product.
• CpK for a given process characteristic
• CpK for a product characteristic
• Number of product returns
• Product returns parts per million.
• Corrective action cycle time
• Number of open corrective actions
• Number of audit action items.
• Sales Volume
• Net profit
  

• inventory turns
• Number of key customers.
• installation time
• Number of preventive actions
• Quality Costs.
• Number of supplier rejects
• Key supplier lead times
• Number of data entry errors
• Rework costs.
• Defect costs.
• Number of processes out of control
  

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Determining Quality Assurance Metrics

When determining metrics, select metrics that are global to the entire operation. Then select metrics that support those global metrics. Break the metrics down by department, process, organization function or product.

The metrics have to be agreed upon. A management committee determines the metrics. Senior managment communicates these metrics through out the company.

All employees should be able to identify the metrics. All employees should know how their work affect the metrics.

Make metric targets reasonable and challenging. Management provides the plans to achieve the targets. During the quality management review, review the metrics and document the plans to achieve the targets.

Some companies put the quality objectives within the quality assurance manual. I do not recommend this. Your customers do not need to see your quality objectives. In most cases these are confidential.