Quality Control in Furniture Production

Quality is conformance to a set of standards for production, quality control is the procedure used to make a product conforming to the standard, and inspection is examination of raw materials, parts, and products to determine if they conform to the standard; statistical quality control is the application of statistical and engineering analysis to control the quality variables in the production process. Questionnaires received from 53 companies in the Southern Furniture Manufacturers’ Association in March, 1950, indicated that there was wide variation in quality control within these factories, and that there was much room for improvement. Weaknesses in most plants included lack of organization for quality control and lack of definite written or sample standards. Quality control should be handled by a separate department or by a single employee. The quality control department head should be on a level of authority comparable to that of the plant superintendent; he should be at the lowest executive level that reflects company policy so that he will command respect but not make quality control too strict or costly. Several people will have to contribute to the forming of quality standards represented by written or sample standards, but these should finally be set by top management. Factors to be controlled and the personnel to do the job are outlined for the inspection of incoming materials, lumber seasoning, machining, veneer and gluing processes, sanding, assembly, finishing, and packing. The Shewart control charts for statistical quality control are based on the theory that any production and inspection operation is subject to some stable pattern of variation due to chance, and that variations outside this pattern can be located and corrected. The chart enables the user to distinguish between variations due to assignable causes which can be corrected–such as a worn bearing on a machine–and variations due to natural causes–such as differences in machining due to differing densities in a species of wood.

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