Every business wants to create a good quality product. All the teams, from sales to executive to support to marketing to development, talk about ways in which they can boost the quality of a product. However, regardless of how much the teams discuss about quality, chances are high that your company doesn’t have a unified and clear definition of what quality is.
A worse fact is that the companies don’t have a measured and transparent approach towards measuring the KPIs that help in boosting the quality of their services. By taking into account engineering reliability, you can measure whether or not the quality of your product is meant for the long run. If you’re looking forward to know how to quantify the quality of your business products, here’s what you should know about it.
Measure the quality of your products – Questions to answer first
How are you supposed to measure the quality of a product? Before you do this, you have to answer the question whether or not the solution will meet the users’ and the company’s’ definition of quality. Before your company’s development team starts working on the new features, such validations can be done utilizing mockups or other ‘lean’ techniques.
- You have run user testing to justify that the features solve all kind of concerns faced by users
- The introduced design abides by the company’s interaction design and design patterns
- User testing shows that the proposed solution is easy-to-use and intuitive
- Ongoing functionality has designed for all sorts of new features
Measuring the quality of implementation
Did the development team build the things that were defined in the design and requirements specifications? These metrics usually revolve around manual demonstrations, functional tests that show that every story was incorporated as per the specification.
- You have to check that the functionality matches with each and every back-end and front-end requirement
- You also need to ensure that the UX design in each form matches the design team and is approved by the product manager
How to measure the quality of the whole product that you offer
- Pre-sales material and collateral properly describe the issue your product solves and the function that is defined by the manager of the product.
- The new features include the right hooks that are required by the support team
- The new features all comprise of a demo for the entire sales team to utilize
This is a partial list that gives you a clear idea of the quality areas that need to be considered. However, you and your team will require deciding the great quality areas that are vital for the company. You have to agree on factors like:
- The metrics you’ll use
- How you define quality and
- The method to evaluate the quality before you launch all new release
Calculating internal timing efficiency metrics
There are several metrics that offer insight into how effectively your facility operates in terms of timing. Some of the basic factors are:
- Changeover time: What time does it take to switch to another new line of product? Does it last from a few minutes to a few weeks?
- Manufacturing time: What time does it take to process the order to complete the production of finished goods?
- New product introduction rate: This is the average time to introduce a new item into the market.
- Change order cycle time: This is the average time that is needed to execute altered orders from the process of documentation throughout the process of production.
Most businesses, especially the smaller ones, don’t invest in a few essentials like hiring a maintenance engineer or hiring a quality analyst for their company. They have probably never thought about the definition of quality in such detail. Hence, if you wish to achieve success, you should know how to measure the quality of the product.
