Does your company have a suitable quality management system? Do you deliver what the customer asks for? Here are some points that can be used as reference points for the internal review.
Quality management system will shape the way we work
Quality cannot be controlled into a product. It has to be built into it, and everyone involved in the production process must participate. Suppliers of welded products are familiar with the statements, but is everyone sure what this really means and implies?
The textbook answer is that when we use EN ISO 3834 "Quality requirements for welding, fusion welding of metallic materials" together with NS-EN 1090 "Execution of steel structures and aluminum structures", the special process and art form that welding is, will be well taken care of.
When it comes to Quality and Quality Assurance for welding, and compliance with the specific requirements mentioned above, we don't usually talk about good or bad quality.
For us, it is therefore far more accurate to talk about right or wrong quality in terms of the extent to which the inherent properties of the finished product live up to the standard requirements, as well as to the task that the product will perform and the load it will withstand.
Quality assurance is a holistic system
The quality system, as it should function in any business, includes the organizational structure, procedures, processes and resources necessary to implement quality management. The system must ensure that the company's activities are carried out optimally in terms of efficiency, reliability, safety and economy. The system thus encompasses technical, administrative and human resources.
What do we mean by the term optimal quality?
Optimal quality is a term that is also often used with regard to QA systems, and the term deserves to be defined so that everyone understands what is meant by it.
Optimal quality is a term borrowed from economics and refers to a quality level where there is a good balance or agreement between the quality of the finished product and the effort or cost of production, as well as the price the market is willing to pay for the product.
It goes without saying that our goal is to produce as close to optimal quality as possible.
The quality handbook
Quality assurance thus involves all the planned and systematic activities that are implemented as part of the quality system and that are shown to be necessary to provide sufficient confidence that a product or service will meet the quality requirements.
This description of quality assurance is usually written down in the individual company's own quality manual. The quality manual is a document that sets out the company's quality policy and the organization's quality system. It often refers to systematic measures to ensure that quality is planned, implemented and achieved.
What is meant by quality management?
Quality management is a means to achieve your company's goals and to build up routines for quality assurance of your own work. Welding quality assurance involves keeping track of information related to welds that have been performed by your company.
Non-conformance management is an important element of quality control
Several measures can be taken to ensure that the quality system is optimal, but one of the most important tools is a well-functioning deviation system.
Non-conformity systems and systems for mapping non-conformities give us important pointers as to where further quality measures are required, by reporting errors, putting them into a system and tracing them back to the cause. It is not the damage or failure itself that is the deviation. The deviation is that the error was allowed to occur in the first place, and it is the course of events prior to the damage or failure, or the technical cause of the failure, that is the "deviation" to be reported.
Quality assurance work with Weld IT
When it comes to Weld IT, we have established good routines for implementing a standardized quality management system that is regularly checked and reported back.
Weld IT provides the solutions needed to ensure an overview of projects, FPC/KS systems, HSE systems and an overview of the company's welding procedures. The system also contributes to the cost curve pointing downwards by streamlining the document management process.
Weld IT has a good system for quality assurance
Our quality assurance is geared towards the task of producing the right product, but it's not just a system for checking that the product is right. It encompasses all the management procedures needed to enable you to procure, manufacture and deliver the customized and right quality. Quality cannot be controlled into a product. Control can only weed out the products that don't measure up. Quality must therefore be planned and built into the product.
Weld IT removes barriers so that managers and resource persons do not have to deal with complex documentation systems. When the welding job is finished in the workshop, so is the documentation. With a focus on user-friendliness and customer satisfaction, we want to strengthen our customers' competitiveness.
