QA Department functions and workflow

How to improve QA department productivity
in 3 minutes

The best way for a business to manage quality is to introduce an effective quality assurance management system into the enterprise processes and operations which should be under careful quality control of QA Department. Such a system is concerned with planning quality control measures, checking and reviewing operations and procedures that has been done at the enterprise. QA Department operates such major function as follows: Development of QA policy. This function assumes development, maintenance and improvement of tasks and procedures of QA management, QA policy and also quality control over various projects, production, selling and other activity. Certified procedures and guides are the basic documentation of QA management system. After all required documentation for development of QA policy has been combined which is confirmed, for example, with Standard MS ISO 9001, the quality control will be performed with reference to and in accordance with the collected documentation. Evaluation of quality level. These evaluations are conducted by means of the original or adopted techniques at the enterprise, in its divisions, branches. The evaluations can be practical and numerical. The first one is conducted on production meetings of experts by means of discussion of certain lines of business procedures and operations at the enterprise. Numerical evaluation is settled up mainly on the basis of model Total Quality Management (TQM). Depending on the evaluation type the management makes decisions on measures for improvements of procedures and operations. Results of regular estimations are necessary for documenting. Internal and external audit . This function assumes internal and external audit of the quality management system and quality assurance in divisions and enterprise services. It is possible to tell that this is the most important function. It is a feedback of quality control system. It is a point that distinguishes a modern quality management based on Standard MS ISO 9000 and TQM from all previous models. Documentation. The function is aimed to create and keep documents on the projects for formalizing task and processes, keeping statistics and getting lessons learnt. The enterprise can quickly get valued information and use it to make correction to ongoing activity and improve quality management. In accordance with the mentioned functions QA Department builds its workflow and manages tasks of the employees. The instance of the usual workflow can be built on the following processes: Identifying what checks and arrangements are required Preliminary checking components/ingredients/materials Checking components Checking packaging materials Checking packed products Customer support Each of the processes is divided into tasks which are assigned to employees of QA Department. For example, the process "Checking components" can be divided into such task list as "Component 1", "Component 2", "Component 3", and so on. QA Manager assigns QA Specialists to these tasks, set task due dates and priorities.
		VIP Task Manager allows to customize workflow and edit task statuses. This gives flexibility in managing QA Department. Each process of the workflow has peculiarities which are determined by tasks. According to the mentioned workflow model, QA Manager can use Task Tree view of VIP Task Manager to build the framework of workflow and add tasks.
	To customize each process and add new task statuses, QA Manager can go to Workflow editor. For example, the process "8.Customer support" can be customized with new task statuses, such as "Draft", "In queue", "Processing", "Cancelled", and "Satisfied". QA Manager just needs to create new workflow "Customer support" in workflow editor and add these statuses. The task group "Customer support" will have assigned workflow "Customer support", so that all tasks created in this group will be according to appropriate workflow.