Quality assurance is an integrated part of any calibration facility. The calibration
facility as well as its customers are interested in the facility production outgoing
quality. In most calibration labs the inspection of calibrated items is performed
according to a suitable sampling inspection policy. Some of these policies are very good
in assuring the quality of the calibration services they offer, but do not provide a clear
assessment of the outgoing quality of the entire production of the facility. This paper
has developed two methods of calculating the average outgoing quality (AOQ) of a
calibration lab that uses a multistage sampling inspection policy. The policy structure is
presented first along with the exact procedure of how to perform it by the inspectors and
the methods to calculate the AOQ. The two methods differ from each another in the type of
data required to calculate the AOQ. The first method requires the technicians’ production,
the number of items subject to inspections and the number of failing items found. The
second method requires only the number of technicians at each level of the multistage
inspection policy. The verifications of the performances of two methods are accomplished
by building a simulation model on an Excel worksheet. The model simulates the calibration
facility with the right parameters, and then compares the two methods with the actual AOQ.
The paper further discusses the advantages and disadvantages of each method in a broader
context of quality assurance.