The quality department plays a vital role in any manufacturing organization. Quality Assurance and Quality Control are part of Quality Management Systems (QMS). But what do quality assurance (QA) and quality control (QC) do? And how is their role linked with continuous improvement? All of your answers are provided in the following analysis.
What is Quality Assurance and Control?
Quality Assurance refers to maintaining an intended quality level in products and services right from the very beginning of the production process or service delivery. It prevents faults, losses, waste, and defects in manufactured goods to provide sufficient confidence that the product will meet the requisite quality.
Quality control is a systematic process or set of activities within a business or organisation designed to ensure that products or services meet specific quality standards and meet customer expectations. Quality control is like your quality checkpoint. It is the detailed process of inspecting, testing and evaluating products or services to ensure they meet specific standards. Imagine a chef in a restaurant testing every dish before it leaves the kitchen.
That’s quality control in action. Here’s how quality control works. Businesses systematically examine their products or services, looking for defects, inconsistencies or deviations from the desired quality standards. It’s all about identifying and catching any issues before they reach the customer. In some cases, this involves testing. Testing is to ensure the product or service performs as expected.
It involves monitoring and inspecting products, processes or services at various stages of production to identify and correct defects or deviations from established quality criteria. The goal of quality control is to maintain consistent quality, reduce defects, and improve customer satisfaction by ensuring that products or services meet or exceed predetermined quality standards.
What is the Role of Quality Assurance and Quality Control?
Quality assurance is not just about catching defects, it’s about preventing them from happening in the first place. Instead of tasting each dish as it’s cooked, it’s about ensuring that every ingredient, every recipe and every step in the cooking process is perfectly calibrated to produce consistently excellent dishes.
Quality assurance includes process improvement which identifies areas for improvement in production or service delivery and makes ongoing adjustments to enhance quality. It’s about training and education ensuring that employees are well trained and equipped to maintain high quality standards.
There is also documentation that keeps meticulous records of processes and procedures to track and control quality over time. Last but not least, standards and guidelines establish clear quality standards and guidelines that everyone in the business follows to ensure the product stays at a high quality.
Quality assurance is like building quality into a business’s DNA. It’s about creating systems and processes that consistently lead to high-quality outcomes. Quality control and Quality assurance are the dynamic doors that businesses rely on to ensure their goods and services meet or exceed expectations.
Quality control acts as a vigilant checkpoint catching the defects before they reach the customer. On the other hand Quality assurance is the proactive approach I am waiting for quality in every aspect of the business from ingredients to processes. Together they ensure that the customer gets the quality they deserve while helping businesses build trust and maintain competitiveness in the ever-evolving marketplace.
What is the Difference between Quality Assurance and Quality Control?
Following are the comparison of Quality Assurance vs Quality control –
- Meaning
- Quality Assurance refers to a systematic technique of maintaining the desired quality level which provides sufficient confidence that the product or service has the requisite quality.
- On the other hand, Quality Control is an industrial management tool that aims at maintaining a uniform acceptable level of quality in the products by testing samples of the goods produced against the set criteria.
- Focus
- While Quality Assurance aims to prevent defects from arising.
- Whereas Quality Control focuses on identifying defects in products by comparing samples to established set benchmarks.
- Orientation
- Quality Assurance is a process-oriented technique.
- Quality Control is a product-oriented technique.
- Methods of Involvement
- Quality Assurance is a proactive method of the QMS as it prevents defects from arising by maintaining the quality right from the very beginning.
- Quality Control is a reactive method of the QMS as it checks the quality after the products are manufactured to identify if the products are in line with the customer’s requirements.
- Function Mode
- Quality Assurance is a staff function.
- Quality Control is a line function.
- Implementation
- In Quality Assurance, quality is implemented at the designing stage.
- Whereas in Quality Control, quality is implemented at the final stage i.e. when the outcome is produced.
- Objectives
- The primary objective of Quality Assurance is to refine product development to prevent defects as much as possible.
- The primary objective of Quality Control is to identify defects after a product is created through testing but before it is packaged.
- Other Factors
- Quality Assurance can be achieved by introducing an effective quality management system that keeps a check on the quality of products and services at every stage of production.
- Quality Control can be achieved by identifying defects in the products and eliminating them by using various quality management tools.
Why is ISO 9001 Important to Run Business Effectively?
Since its beginnings in 1947, ISO has published over 19,500 international standards covering almost every aspect of technology and manufacturing and services. To take care of standard development, ISO has members from 165 countries and 3,368 technical bodies as of today. ISO established a standard called ISO 9001 for quality management systems. It comprises a set of generic standard requirements governing the quality management systems of certified companies or other organizations.
This certification must be reviewed annually and renewed every three years. Although it is called a standard, one of the foundational requirements of this standard is that its implementation shall be based on a system of dynamic processes rather than a set of static standards. In summary, the ISO 9001 standard requires procedures for the following activities to be documented and evidence maintained that they are being followed.
Control of documents and records to gather customer requirements and the recording of product testing, control of non-conforming products to prevent defects and rejects from being sent to customers. Continual improvement through corrective and preventive actions is necessary when mistakes have been made to prevent them from happening again.
Internal audits show that the organization takes seriously its commitment to quality and conformance to the ISO 9001 standard. Maintaining well-implemented compliance with the ISO 9001 standard helps an organization focus on meeting customer requirements and exceeding customer expectations with processes that are ever more effective and efficient.
Conclusion
Quality Assurance And Control Quality assurance ensures that products or services consistently meet defined quality standards and customer expectations. It involves creating and implementing processes, standards, and procedures to prevent defects or errors before they occur, rather than simply identifying and correcting them after the fact.
