EVALUATION OF THE ROLE OF INSPECTION AND QUALITY CONTROL IN AN ORGANIZATION

1.0 INTRODUCTION 
1.1 BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY
In most factories the activities covering the quality and inspection function are spread throughout its own department and may also spread to supplies of subcontracted items, component supplies, customers and the distribution chain.
At the start of industrial revolution,, goods were supplied by individuals or small groups restricted to the family. Individual craftsman often carried out all the function of quality control and inspection both managerial and technical. The craftsman know his customers needs, planned to meet them, made the articles as well as well as the current state of technology allowed, and need also received his customers complaints.
With the growth of industry and the increasing complexity of project and organizations quality problem began to grow and the management activities of planning, controlling and execution have to be divided between several individuals, although the owner kept control of the key decisions such as setting standards, interpreting results and deciding actions. He was able to do this because he was physically present and know all that was going on and the enterprise was still comparatively small and the employee interest and his own were identical. As the industrial revolution progresses and technology developed and because more widespread, the importance of inspection and quality control function increased for it was not only the company which was now vulnerable but the population at large-a detect circuit breaker can paralyzed a whole district, detect gas equipment can result in explosion and loss of life, a raissile filing to launch gives enormous propaganda advantages to am enemy.
Large companies formed and met the technical challenges by creating technical specialist but they failed to meet the managerial caused by dispersion of quality and inspection activities, both physical and organizational inspection increased by solely with the aim of sorting good from bad, for the first time we had employees whose main activities was inspection and quality and who eventually formed a separate organization unit of the company. During world war 11, inspection was established and has already started to enrich into the area of standardization, detect, prevention and analysis of complaints.
Statistical quality control, reliability, engineering and reliability evaluation were rapidly introduced. The quality control and inspection are important technical and economical considerations in manufacturing. Through engineers and customers specific quality standard is the responsibility of the manufacturing division to produce work of satisfactory quality.
Product quality is defined as “A set of specification governing, functional performance, composition, strength, shape, dimensions, workmanship, colour and finish” quality is meaning fully only in relation to the purpose and end of the product.
Good quality is attained when a product fully satisfies the purpose for which it is designed Oyeoku (1993).
Since the research is on product quality control and inspection in manufacturing industry (undever, Nigeria Plc, Aba) it is good also to know the measuring of quality control and inspection. This will them reveal to the manufacturers what they will look into when inspecting or controlling the quality of a product.
There is no single, concise definition of quality control which is broad enough to convey a complete picture of the overall industrial quality control activity but at the same time narrow enough to differentiate it unambiguously from related industrial activities. He further said that the move acceptable definition is that quality control is “the recognition and removal of identifiable causes of detects and variations from the set standards of a product”. When a product is substandard, statistical techniques can be used for the systematic observation of quality and interpretation of variability, and then corrective action can be undertaken.
Since the quality of a product may be checked by inspection, inspection then means the application of tests and measuring devices to compare products and performance with specified standards. It determines whether a given product fall within specified limits of variability and therefore is acceptable or unacceptable.
Acceptance inspection cannot inspect good quality into the product rather it merely identifies non acceptance unit after detects occur by detecting substandard work during by providing foreman engineers, designers with information useful in eliminating assignable causes of detect work. Since there are differences between what used to be and sometimes still know as inspection and quality control, it is often assumed that there is no significant differences on the reasoning that a “rose by any name would smell as sweet”.
So far as techniques are concerned, quality control includes most of those employed in inspection. This must be so far measurement of size, weight, volume finish, colour, performance and so forth, are still a vital part of quality control and inspection activity. However, quality control adds other techniques such as sampling and statistical analysis to the older and important basic tools of the inspection. The differences are of less importance then the difference of approach or philosophy behind the two. Inspection in the old fashioned sense, in a passive activity.

EVALUATION OF THE ROLE OF INSPECTION AND QUALITY CONTROL IN AN ORGANIZATION