Quality Control Inspections

Date: 09 Sep 2011
Categories: General Post

Do you do regular quality control inspections? Many facilities do. What method do you use? Manual, on paper? Do you use some sort of system? A computer system? Do you use a handheld computer? There are many options to choose from.

Even if you do not have a formal system, any good Manager or Supervisor is always doing inspections. A good Manager is constantly seeing the areas they walk through and mentally documenting areas that need attention.

But why should we take the time to document inspection results?

For one thing, employees want to know how they are doing. I believe that most employees want to do a good job. At least the good employees do. And they want to know if they are doing a “good job”. If they are falling short, they want to know so they can improve.

If you use a “Pay for Performance” compensation system a formal, documented inspection system will help you justify pay increases. A computerized system makes it easy to generate a report for any employee being evaluated.

What type of rating system do you use for your inspections? My experience tells me that most Managers prefer a pass/fail system, where an item is either clean or dirty. This method is much less subjective than a method that uses a rating scale of 1 to 4 or 1 to 10. A pass/fail system also makes reporting scores much easier to interpret. A passing score of “95%” is easier for Administration to understand than a score of “3.4”.

The availability of handheld computers streamlines the inspection process. Printing a form, writing on paper, and then entering results back into a system take up valuable Supervisor time. Digital Housekeeper® Mobile™, for example, simplifies and speeds this process to downloading the inspection, clicking the results into the handheld and then uploading again.

So if you are doing inspections, good for you. Keep doing them. If you do not have anything in place, start a system. There are many ways to document results. Visit our website, email or call us for information on Digital Housekeeper.