Objective page

Quality Assurance- the product must fulfil the specification points for its production. The product must be high quality, suitable for the purpose intended and reliable.

Quality Control- These are tests and inspections that are carried out to ensure the product meets the specification criteria (Definitions from GCSE Textiles Technology for OCR ISBN 0-435-41666-9)

The Quality control checks that are made will hopefully ensure a quality product is made and so will guarantee Quality assurance.

Quality checks are made throughout the production of the garment. If you were making a batch of 50 items you would stop and check say 1 in every 10. You would check the product for the some of the following:

• Construction- seams are neat, sewn correctly, correct stitch used, no holes

• Any fastenings are sewn on correctly and in place

• If buttons on product check holes are correct size

• Size

• Fabric has no holes, pulls in it or markings

• Safety

• Value for money

• Packaging

• The look of the item

If you did not do checks you could end up with a lot of faulty products. This will lead to wastage of materials and sales. Consumers would complain and the company would loose a lot of money. Consumers want value for money and quality.

How to relate this to your product?

Make sure you explain this page well. You may all have the same definitions or re-write them yourself but tell me how you are going to use this information to ensure you produce a quality product. Produce a list of the checks you are going to make and list things the faults you could find at each check. Use the bullet points above to help you, include diagrams if this helps you.

eg.