With more and more companies wanting to adapt a lean culture to reduce downtime, increase efficiency, and reduce waste improving Quality and Manufacturing practices is key. I believe one of the first aspects in improving Quality in general is getting everybody on board to buy in to this culture. By doing this, most departments will be open minded to improving all aspects of quality and manufacturing.

To answer your question one way that comes to mind to improve Quality Control is to identify what type of processes within the company are essentially redundant and fail to add much value. Specifically, I find that improving the inspection process of parts and devices is a huge way to improve Quality Control. Quality control usually does 100% inspection of parts and devices at some point. Identifying a way to reduce the amount of time for this I find adds much value. For example, if Quality Control has to do 100% inspection in which they have to measure all dimensions of a part or device based on a drawing, could take a substantial amount of time if the lot size is large. A simple way to reduce this downtime and still be effective in detecting failures is to only identify which dimensions are critical to failure and have Quality Control only inspect those dimensions. In addition, doing First Article Inspections on the first couple parts can also contribute to still meeting Quality standards in quicker turn around time.

Another way to improve Quality Control is to provide better equipment to the department for them to conduct their analysis. Inspection equipment can be old or very tedious in how it functions. For example, using devices like Optical Comparators is a great device to magnify an object but can be time consuming to use and also cause more stringent analysis of inspection then what is actually necessary.