How has the emphasis of quality control changed in recent years?

How has the emphasis of quality control changed in recent years? Describe some of the modern quality control techniques that illustrate this change in emphasis?

The emphasis of quality control is changed as the separate quality control department is closed in many organization and the quality control function is now under the department of operation management. The reasons behind this change were the high cost associated with quality control department and it was also not effective one as the quality was inspected at the end of production which was not effective technique. The number of dissatisfied customers were increasing despite of having a quality control department as it was not observing the quality of product properly. The benefits of quality control department were few while the costs was high due to more workers and resources to run the quality control department.

Due to modern quality control techniques i.e. quality control is a continuous process which should be performed at every step of production process. Under this concept, managers start believing that the quality control should be under the operations management planning process to inspect the quality of product at every step of production instead of inspecting at the end of production line. This concept gives new standards and techniques for quality control. The new standard is Six Sigma Quality which states that the standard is to achieve 3.4 defects per million units. The new techniques are Statistical Quality Control and Statistical Process Control. Statistical Quality Control states that the quality of product should be maintained from start of the production and Statistical Process Control includes the inspection of statistical samples in every step of production line.