How to Create a Digital Quality Assurance Program in 5 Steps

Maintaining quality is essential for your organization. A quality assurance and maintenance program ensures the reliability of plans and procedures. It helps you maintain quality in your products and overall organization.

A digital quality assurance (QA) program lets you monitor quality seamlessly without having the need to do anything manually. It connects your employees, customers, and departments. I’m sure you know all the perks of having a digital quality assurance program for your business. The challenging part is creating a customized digital QA program for your business.

If you’re struggling to create a digital quality assurance program or if you’re planning to create one, this article is for you. It covers the steps that will make your job easier.

5 Steps to Create a Digital Assurance Program

Step #1: Define Goals and Standards

If you’re shifting to a digital quality assurance program, you should have your goals and standards defined already. If it’s your first time, you need to start off with two things:

1. Define clear goals to focus on what you want to achieve with the program.
2. Set criteria to meet these goals.

For instance, if you’re defining QA goals for your maintenance department, you can set goals in terms of minimizing unscheduled downtime. Let’s assume, you want to have no more than a single unscheduled downtime per year.

When setting goals, consider local laws and regulations. You have to maintain minimum quality for products, employee safety and health, etc., as per state laws. This is one area where your quality assurance program will help you. Meeting government laws gets easier with a robust quality assurance program with clearly defined goals.

You need to create separate goals for each department and work activity in your organization. For instance, you can create QA goals for marketing, customer services, product, production line, employee safety, etc. Once the goals are set, you need to create standards for each work activity. Standards help you monitor if things are moving in the right direction.

Step #2: Set Standard Operating Procedures

You can’t improve quality in the absence of set procedures (aka SOPs). Setting procedures is an important step in the development of a digital quality assurance program.

Set procedures and policies for all the departments and tasks will define how things are to be done. Well-defined procedures and policies are essential for the development of a robust quality assurance program. But what’s more important than having procedures defined is their accessibility. Can your employees access SOPs as per need?

If they can’t access SOPs via their mobile devices, they won’t be able to follow them. And if they can’t access and follow procedures, what’s the point of having them?

This is why digital SOPs make more sense.

Step #3: Communicate and Train

Statistics show that as many as 50% of organizations consider their technicians’ soft skills training as a high priority. Yes, training is essential, be it soft or hard skills.

Not all procedures and policies are easy to understand. You have to not only communicate standard procedures to your workforce but you have to train them as well.

Again, digital SOPs are easier to share and communicate as compared to traditional ones. With MaintainX, for instance, you have to create SOPs just once and these will be instantly accessible by your entire team. Any edits will apply instantly.

Moreover, you should conduct formal training sessions to ensure your employees know the ins and outs. Show new procedures and policies to managers so they know what changes you have made and how they should respond.

Step #4: Implement QA Program

The quality assurance program with all its procedures and policies should be implemented formally after communicating it and training your employees. Sending multiple reminders prior to the implementation of the new or revised QA program will ensure that everyone is all set and prepared to follow the new procedures.

Once you implement the program, help your employees follow the new procedures. Constant communication is key here.

Step #5: Monitor and Tweak

After you have successfully implemented your digital quality assurance program, you need to start monitoring it. The purpose of monitoring is to find issues and improve overall quality across all the departments. Feedback is an important component of the monitoring process. Get feedback from managers and employees about the QA program. Ask them if it helped them and how you can improve it.

Based on reviews and feedback, change your policies and procedures. The best QA programs are the ones you update regularly.

Start Your QA Program with MaintainX

A digital quality assurance program saves you time and resources and is easier to administer.

Before you get started, choose a CMMS to help you create, manage, share, and tweak your quality assurance program and its procedures. MaintainX will help you digitize and manage SOPs and lets you and your team access work orders from any device.

Create and implement your digital QA program and start monitoring its progress. Focus on how to incorporate new challenges into your quality assurance program is the first step towards better quality.