It is common for quality control people to do research on items and collect an abundance of data. Often times, the information collected is so vast it takes a long time to go through.  This is because a good portion of the information is not even relevant to the research or project.  Always analyze the data you are collecting so you are not wasting time.  Only collect the information that is required for the quality control project’s goal.  This means if you are sending out a survey to customers, don’t include irrelevant questions that have nothing to do with the goal you are trying to achieve.  This will waste time analyzing the data and coming to conclusions.

Sampling is an excellent way to reduce the amount of data that you need to collect.  Quality control improvement of data collection includes sampling to help you reduce time significantly.  This means that if you are trying to send out a large scale survey across many industries, sample the representatives and not the entire population you were planning on using.  If your conclusions are not clear enough to use for quality control issues then you can always expand a sample group to get a more accurate result.

The way you use the data collected can help you reduce time with data collection also.  Quality control requires you to use subjective and objective data in order to validate the accuracy of your findings.  Subjective data should be used to help you develop score systems like an index.  Objective data should be used to validate and test the accuracy of the findings of the index or score system developed.

Quality control improvement programs begin with increasing productivity.  This means reducing time spent working on things like data collection.  When you reduce time collecting data it is important to gather only information relevant to what you are researching, try to use samples to collect data, and use the data properly.