An AQL Quality Inspection is an inspection done by adopting a commonly accepted quality acceptance Standard: AQL - ANSI/ASQ STANDARD Z1.4-2003 ISO 2859-1 (Mil Std 105E).
How do you define the quality of your shipment acceptable? Should all defects be rejected? What if some of the defects are minor? What percentage of small or big defects are acceptable? AQL is the widely recommended standards to guide your quality control.
In a continuous production process, some of the products may have 1 kind of defects or another, like: chip, scratch, flash, crack, smirch, stain and dent etc. to name a few. Should we rejected them all? Or can we allow a certain small quantity. How many? AQL shows you.
In most shipments, there are lots of products. It might take too much to inspect every piece by yourselves 100% check inspection is not feasible in most cases, and it is not fare to the factories, and it is hard to control the process, as it might take an inspector days to do the job. What if the factories try to mess things up? The inspector cannot take all the products in close supervision. So the recommended way is final random inspection when all the products are fully packed into the cartons and ready for shipment, it is a professional way. And it is the factory’s responsibilities to check them all before packing.
As all the QC inspections are done by humans, and human tends to make mistake, as we are merely human, a final preshipment inspection is a perfect way to reassure the quality of your products can be accepted averagely.
This AQL inspection had been widely accepted in many industries, for accept material, parts, components, and mostly consumer products, consumer products inspection is what we done most.