Home > Knowledge Series Quality Control In Warehouse

Quality Control In Warehouse

Quality control in warehouses is important to the success of an organization and its business. Focusing on the quality of each order, monitoring and adjusting protocols and processes based on key metrics for the proper packing and shipping of each order can improve the efficiency of operations. Keeping tabs on metrics such as how long it takes to pick, safely package, and correctly fill an order, to then load it properly before it ships out are all fundamental to improving product quality.

What Is Quality Control In A Warehouse?

In the dynamic world of warehouse operations, a warehouse quality checker plays a pivotal role in maintaining efficiency, minimizing errors, and safeguarding customer satisfaction. Warehouse quality control encompasses a comprehensive set of practices aimed at monitoring and evaluating the quality of warehouse operations and ensuring that all work adheres to established standards.

Effective QC in warehouses extends beyond the confines of the warehouse walls, encompassing the entire process of receiving and dispatching goods. This includes meticulously inspecting incoming shipments to ensure that products meet the specified quality standards before they are stored or distributed. This level of vigilance helps protect your reputation and ensures that your customers, or your customers’ consumers if you are a third-party logistics (3PL) warehouse, receive only the highest quality goods.

Quality control in warehouse management extends far beyond mere product inspection; it encompasses a holistic approach to optimizing warehouse operations and minimizing inefficiencies. By implementing rigorous quality control measures, businesses can identify and address potential bottlenecks, streamline processes, and reduce the likelihood of errors. This, in turn, leads to improved efficiency, reduced costs, and enhanced customer satisfaction.

Importance of Quality Control In warehouse

Quality in the warehouse operations is of paramount importance for ensuring that products are stored, handled, and shipped in a manner that maintains their quality and integrity. It plays a crucial role in safeguarding customer satisfaction, minimizing errors and losses, and optimizing warehouse operations.

Enhancing Customer Satisfaction

Effective quality control in warehouse management measures directly contributes to customer satisfaction by ensuring that products reach customers in a timely, undamaged, and defect-free condition. This, in turn, fosters customer loyalty, reduces the likelihood of returns and complaints, and enhances the overall perception of the brand.

Minimizing Errors and Losses

QC in the warehouse helps prevent costly errors and losses that can arise from damaged goods, incorrect shipments, or mishandling of products. By implementing rigorous quality control procedures, businesses can identify and address potential issues early on, reducing the risk of financial losses and reputational damage.

Optimizing Warehouse Operations

Warehouse quality management promotes efficiency and consistency within warehouse operations. By establishing clear quality standards and implementing effective control measures, businesses can streamline processes, reduce rework, and minimize downtime. This, in turn, leads to cost savings, improved productivity, and enhanced overall warehouse performance.

Keeping tabs on metrics such as how long it takes to pick, safely package, and correctly fill an order, to then load it properly before it ships out are all fundamental to improving product quality.

Total Quality Management (TQM)

Total Quality Management (TQM) is a manufacturing philosophy, which focuses on improving quality across the operations, and producing higher quality products with few defects. Total quality management is a structured approach to overall organizational management. The focus of the process is to improve the quality of an organization’s outputs, including goods and services, through the continual improvement of internal practices.

Total warehouse quality assurance extends beyond mere product inspection; it permeates every stage of the warehouse process. It involves establishing clear quality standards, implementing rigorous quality control measures, and empowering employees to take ownership of quality improvement initiatives. This comprehensive approach ensures that quality remains at the forefront of warehouse operations, minimizing errors, reducing costs, and ultimately enhancing customer satisfaction.

The standards set as part of the TQM approach can reflect both internal priorities and any industry standards currently in place. Industry standards are defined at multiple levels and may include adherence to various laws and regulations governing the operation of a particular business. Industry standards can also include the production of items to an understood norm, even if the norm is not backed by official regulations.

Principles of TQM

Customer Focus

Organizations must strive to understand their customers’ current and future needs, and work towards exceeding their expectations by continually improving the quality, processes, etc.
It results in increased customer loyalty, revenue, and reduced waste

Leadership

A business without strong and clear leadership is often directionless and failure prone
An organization must have strong leadership and clearly defined objectives, and its employees must actively work towards achieving those targets
This results in better employee engagement, and participate in working towards common goals.

Employee involvement

Involvement of all the employees of an organization is essential in the development of quality products or services
This ensures increased motivation and accountability amongst the employees, and paves way for innovation in products as well as services

Process-centric approach

Organizations must develop processes in accordance with their vision, mission, and strategies to drive efficiency and effectiveness, and eventually productivity
Such processes, speed-up the overall organizational work, reduce cost, promote continuous improvement, and help deliver quality to the customers

Strategic and systematic approach

Organizations must focus on managing the key processes and the aligning processes together as a system to drive greater efficiency
It is essential to ensure that quality becomes the core aspect of all business processes

Continous improvement

Continous improvement is a mantra that ensures organizations find new ways and techniques to produce better quality products, improve processes, be more competitive, and exceed the customer expectations
Continuous improvement should hence an active business objective, especially to develop the ability to embrace new opportunities and adapt to new market conditions

Data centric approach

Often organizations take impulsive decisions in the lack of meaningful data
TQM ensures organizations collect and analyze data on a continual basis so as to improve quality, introduce fact-based & accurate decision making, forecasts based on past history, and achieve consensus

Mutually beneficial supplier relations

This principle recognizes that an organization and its suppliers are independent, and a strong mutually beneficial relationship between the two enhances productivity and the ability to create value
The result is optimization of costs and resources, seamless work practices, and commitment towards delivering customer satisfaction

How to improve Quality in a Warehouse?

Supply chains are networks that require fast and clear communication about accurate information on supply and demand. Implementing effective quality control (QC) in warehouse management can save the facility money by identifying and reducing wasted orders, time, energy, and materials. Here are ways to improve quality in warehouse operations which will make operations more competitive and favorable to stakeholders involved.

Inspect individual orders

To ensure order fulfillment is high, it is important for warehouse managers to assign quality control in warehouse duties to
Cognizance of the importance of hiring the right pickers and establishing warehouse best practices is necessary
The goal of reducing wasted inaccurate orders is a big part of achieving warehouse efficiency
The more orders manually inspected by sharp quality control experts, the more possibility to identify the root of the problem that is causing inaccurate orders to flow through the system
The more accurate order fulfillment becomes, the more returns can be reduced and customer satisfaction can be improved.

Invest in streamlining technology

One of the most effective ways to improve warehouse and customer satisfaction is to invest in state-of-the-art warehouse management software
Not only will it improve order accuracy, it allows documenting problems easily, allowing to move items such as defective products to specific locations
Warehouse team will be able to locate products quickly with barcode scanners that connect with infrastructure
Communication with the distribution center will be more seamless, as inventory management will be more simplified

Track daily progress

Another excellent reason for a digital warehouse management system is to track operational performance on a daily basis
Analyzing performance data will allow to detect inefficiencies that need to be addressed immediately
It will indicate which team members are the most productive and do assignments in a timely manner with precision
It will also allow analyzing the shipping and receiving process, as well as improve storage strategies

Make quality control a high priority

The best way to improve product distribution and inventory management is to make quality control an important aspect of business
When quality control is made a top priority, teams will move toward an error-free operation, especially if using AI software and automation
The result will be a stronger record of accomplishment for on-time delivery and receiving, accurate documentation, and compliance with rules for loading and marking causing fewer customer complaints and a better chance of boosting profit margins

Tighten up quality controls

The first step to improving quality control is to understand why it exists, which is to limit errors such as wrong orders or defective products
Failure to see this last line of defense as critical is how a brand can swiftly alienate its customers and fall behind competitors

Comparing Fulfillment Models: Dark Store vs. E-commerce

Explore differences in traditional and hyperlocal e-commerce warehouses. Read our blog to know more!

Tools to control Quality check process in warehouse

Warehouse quality checker benefits a warehouse in that it should successfully catch issues early on and limit any future mistakes. This can help tighten up inefficient processes or aid in diagnosing a specific problem and improve warehouse efficiency. Seven warehouse quality checker tools that help organizations troubleshoot errors are illustrated below

Cause & Effect Daigram

A cause-and-effect diagram (also referred to as the Ishikawa or a fishbone diagram) shows the potential causes of a specific issue
To create a cause-and-effect diagram, a warehouse manager brainstorms with his team to come up with a list of every possible reason for an error
For example, the warehouse team may be consistently forgetting to include packing slips
Everyone works together to disqualify the less likely causes and identify the most probable reason
Then they develop a solution to prevent the problem from recurring

Check Sheet

Warehouse employees can use check sheets to mark off daily tasks, count inventory, or (as in the example below) record the days on which issue occurred
The increase in responsibility on the part of workers is beneficial to encouraging workers to check their work
Managers can use check sheets to identify patterns and make more informed decisions about how to run the warehouse

Flow Chart

Flowchart (sometimes called stratification or run chart) illustrates each separate step in a workflow
Using a workflow can assist in determining which part of the workflow requires more scrutiny

Histogram

A control chart is a more sophisticated flowchart that shows how a workflow changes over time
It includes a line for the average, a line for the upper control limit (UCL), and a line for the lower control limit (LCL)
By comparing data on the current shipping workflow to these lines, warehouse managers can differentiate between normal fluctuations and unexpected spikes

Pareto Chart

The errors are listed in descending order of frequency, and the line represents the cumulative frequency
Warehouse managers can use a Pareto chart to identify the most significant problem(s) and prioritize fixing those first
This prevents the warehouse team from resolving issues that won’t be as impactful

Scatter Diagram

A scatter diagram helps illustrate the relationship between two variables
It can determined how intense two factors correlate or if they share a positive or negative relationship
This allows managers to know whether to further investigate the variables or look for something more relevant
For example, warehouse managers can use it to identify the relationship between the number daily orders and the number of errors

5S in warehouse

The 5S is a lean strategy that helps to achieve warehouse objective i.e. to solve the problems. Getting a warehouse that is clean, organized, and much more than looking fantastic. It is all about making warehousing operations most effective; excel in training and communications, and eventually saving money and time. A facility that has introduced 5S can rapidly detect or surface problems or address the causes and fix the brief-term challenges to avoid recurrence. Let us look the 5S steps for implementing 5S in the Warehouse.

Sort- Seiri

Workers sort everything in a workspace into what is and what is not needed
Some use a system called “red tagging” in which every item not necessary for a process gets red-tagged during the sort phase
These items are set aside and evaluated later. Workers store seldom used items nearby, but not at the workstation
They discard unsafe items and clutter

Set in Order- Seiton

It makes sure all items get ordered, and each object has a specified position
Organize all the things remaining in the workspace in a structured manner to promote the execution of job assignments for the worker

Shine- Seiso

The active attempts to be safe and tidy in work environments ensure purpose-oriented work assignments for the worker

Standardize- Seike

Establish a set of norms for both organization and processes
Mostly, this is when the first three S’s are considered or guidelines made as to whether and when certain activities should be carried out

Sustain- Shitsuke

Supporting innovative policies and performing internal audits
Conduct regular evaluation or even surprise inspections to make sure workers are following the new standards
The focus is on applying the laws and integrating them into the company’s work so that they become habits

Elevate Warehouse Quality Assurance

Pyrops WMS is committed to providing comprehensive warehouse management solutions (WMS) tailored to your specific quality control needs. Our team of experienced professionals will collaborate closely with you to assess your requirements, develop customized quality control procedures, and provide ongoing support to ensure the success of your quality improvement initiatives.

Contact us today and discover how Pyrops WMS solutions can help you elevate your warehouse operations to new heights of efficiency and customer satisfaction.