Quality and customer satisfaction are synonymous. It’s critical to keep this in mind when it comes to product or service nonconformity control.
Any organization that wants to maintain a sustainable competitive advantage should start by strengthening its customer relationships, to know what they mean by quality, what features and benefits they need to solve their problems, then make sure that your value chain delivers it efficiently, without waste, bottlenecks or delays.
But this is only the first step: the delivery of quality products is not a competitive advantage, it’s an absolute must!
As Kotler would say:
“Total quality is the key to creating value and customer satisfaction. Total quality is everyone’s obligation, just as marketing is everyone’s obligation.”
Therefore, before starting bold plans and innovations, you must have the house in order, deliver at least what is promised, with seamless process modeling, followed by nonconformity control.
In this article, in addition to detailing each step of a widely-illustrated nonconformity control flowchart for products and services, you will have access to this ready-to-use diagram in a free BPM tool, that’s fully editable and can be remotely accessed.
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Nonconformity control flowchart for products and services
If the goal is to achieve seamless business process automation, you don’t need to rely on only BPM tools; others can be used as well.
Project management software, bug trackers, and other helpful applications should also operate in parallel, creating a more effective organizational performance and even assisting in human productivity.
Let us now focus on the purpose of this article:
Understanding a nonconformity control flowchart
Controlling nonconforming products, services or processes is a fundamental quality control activity. Even organizations with virtually no management system will make at least one attempt to create methods for managing nonconformities.
For this reason, a nonconformity process flow must have the following controls:
- Report.
- Evaluation.
- Treatment.
- Approval.
A nonconformity is a failure to meet the requirements expected by customers, and its occurrence decreases the quality of the product, service or process.
The failure may be related to non-compliance with standards, documentation, quality regulations, requirements, contract or customer requirements, and other stakeholders.
Detailing the nonconformity control flow
This nonconformity flowchart is contained in a pool divided into 4 lanes, with the Auditor, the Manager, the Team, and the QMS, each with a lane.
At the beginning of the nonconformity procedure, the auditor detects the nonconformity and reports it to the manager.
The manager reviews the nonconformity, establishes a plan of action, and notifies the team. Note that this pool contains an event subprocess, requiring the manager to continually monitor corrective activities, as below.
Also check out: BPMN subprocess examples, definitions, and flowcharts
In the next step of the nonconformity control flowchart, the team must make the necessary arrangements, submit them to the manager and the manager will send them to the QMS.
Finally, the QMS evaluates the effectiveness of reports and actions, as evidenced by the exclusive gateway (in yellow) and can either approve and forward the process to completion, or remit it to the manager, to create a new action plan.
Understand more: BPMN 2.0 Examples: 8 types of gateways: Inclusive, Exclusive and more!
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