In any industry, effective quality control helps to keep your profit margins as high as possible. By reducing the volume of damaged or unusable product, you can simultaneously maintain customer satisfaction levels, future product development, and your overall efficiency too.
Whether you’re the factory floor supervisor or managing operations across the region, it’s vital to know the most effective ways to prioritise quality control.
Warehouse quality control: Four steps towards profitable success
- Ensure thorough training
As soon as you go through the onboarding process with a new member of staff, it’s imperative that you deliver thorough training on the relevant aspects of their role. Staff training carries numerous benefits, but only when it’s implemented in the right way.
Badly trained employees not only get in the way of your company’s success but could discourage other workers from discovering their true potential. Training creates a sense of community in the workplace and expands your talent pool by keeping workers engaged, improving the range of opportunities for progression in warehousing.
- Use the right tools
You can only achieve the best results with the right equipment. In any line of work, investing in the right tools, equipment and software simplifies completing and tracking each order. Each process relies on specific tools and team members who know how to use them effectively.
Quality should be at the forefront of every new and existing product line. Finding the correct equipment and solutions might feel like a time-consuming process, but it’s one that pays off in the long run. Knowing your industry and understanding your niche demands an intricate knowledge of the tools available in your sector.
For example, those working in the food and drink industry might benefit from positive displacement pumps like these, which offer distinct advantages over centrifugal pumps. Notably, they produce a consistent flow rate regardless of pressure, with assistance from seals or valves to enclose a fixed volume.
- Carry out regular checks
Implementing regular checks through every stage of the manufacturing process will help your team to identify any issues quickly. Rather than wasting excess material and spending valuable time finishing a product that only gets written off, you can focus on a strategy that promotes genuine quality in development.
Optimised inventory management is critical for any warehouse-operated business. Try to ensure that your products are extensively and accurately tracked, monitored, and rotated when they’re kept in storage. These steps reduce the likelihood of your clients reporting to trading standards, which could threaten your ability to trade in the future.
- Get professionally audited
Lastly, calling in a third party to visit your premises and audit your quality control metrics could help to reveal any gaps in your knowledge or weak areas in your existing strategy. Internal quality checks might not reveal the same details or extent of information as professional auditing, no matter how thoroughly they’re undertaken.
Professional audits are most often undertaken at pre-decided intervals, ensuring that each company has their own clear processes for quality control. Most importantly, official audits can help to assess whether a business is compliant with industry-specific standards and requirements, including the Health and Safety at Work Act.
