2. The Role of Quality
• What is the quality control department’s job within the company? What is
the relationship between quality and production? Between quality and
vendors or suppliers? Between quality and customers? Between quality and
regulatory agencies? Each of these relationships has distinguishable
characteristics and unique dynamics that lead to the overall success or failure
of the quality control manager and program.
3. Conti…
• In most food companies the quality control department becomes involved
with all areas of the company, including operations, sales, marketing, and
research and development. These diversions take the quality control manager
away from the four basic functions of quality control:
4. Conti…
• establishing the standards or baseline;
• measuring compliance against the baseline;
• reporting noncompliance; and
• sharing the experience.
5. Establishing the Standards or Baseline
• This process involves asking many questions such as:
• What should the starting, intermediate, and final weight of the product be?
• What color attributes should the product have?
• What shape, size, or other dimensions should the product have?
• What should each level of packaging look like?
6. Conti…
• Are there temperature attributes related to the product?
• How should the product be palletized?
• What lot-coding system should be used?
• What size should the lot code be and where should it be placed?
• Are there any physical or microbiological requirements for the product?
7. Conti…
• the quality control manager determines what the individual attributes and
characteristics of the final product should be. He or she then determines what the
baseline requirement for the attribute is. Because no physical measurement is
absolute, each of these will have a tolerance specification—a plus or minus, if you
will. This baseline becomes the “attribute specification” that, when combined with
all the attribute specifications, makes up the final “internal product specification.”
