Quality management is crucial for any business, regardless of type or sector. Maintaining high standards across products and services supports regulatory compliance and helps build stakeholder confidence.
Terms like quality management, quality assurance, and quality control are often used interchangeably in business. But while they’re related, each one has its own specific role in achieving quality products and services.
In this guide, we’ll explain each term and its differences and how they aid quality management.
- Quality Management brings together the processes and activities that guide and control how an organization achieves quality. It offers a structured way to deliver consistent results and meet relevant standards and expectations.
- Quality Assurance (QA) is a proactive process that establishes proper procedures for delivering a high-quality and compliant product or service.
- Quality Control (QC) involves inspecting, testing, and evaluating products or services to identify and correct any defects or issues.
What Is Quality Management?
Quality Management is a structured approach that helps organizations deliver consistent products and services that meet customer and regulatory requirements. It defines the policies, objectives, and responsibilities that support continual improvement and customer satisfaction.
To achieve these standards, quality management uses various processes, including quality assurance and quality control and other steps like risk management and corrective actions.
Quality management plays a strategic role by involving leadership and aligning quality efforts with the company’s overall goals.
The main goals of quality management include:
- Consistency: Making sure products and services meet the same standards every time.
- Efficiency: Optimizing processes to reduce waste and improve resource usage.
- Customer satisfaction: Exceeding customer expectations with high-quality products and services.
- Continual improvement: Constantly seeking ways to improve processes and outcomes.
- Compliance: Meeting regulatory and legal standards that apply to the industry.
A Quality Management System (QMS) is the backbone of quality management by providing a structured framework for implementing these principles.
What Is Quality Assurance?
Quality assurance is the proactive part of a QMS. It focuses on establishing the correct procedures and processes for high-quality and compliant products or services.
Quality assurance’s main aim is to reduce risks. It does this by finding potential problems early and preventing them from happening. QA is important because it reduces defects found during final inspection, which can be costly to fix and could be detrimental to business.
QA activities include conducting audits to verify compliance with standards, developing standard operating procedures (SOPs) for process consistency, and performing process validation to confirm that procedures reliably produce the desired outcomes.
What Is Quality Control?
Quality control is the inspection part of a QMS. It focuses on identifying and addressing defects or quality issues in finished products, so they match specifications.
QC verifies that QA’s processes are effective. If QC identifies defects or issues, it signals that QA processes may need adjustments to prevent future errors, validating and improving QA efforts.
Quality control is typically conducted at the end of the production process in manufacturing, but in service industries, it involves continual monitoring and evaluation so that standards can be consistently met.
This step is important as it lets businesses identify and fix problems with their product or service before it reaches customers. As a result, QC helps to improve customer satisfaction and protect an organization’s reputation for quality.
Quality Assurance vs. Quality Control—What Is the Difference?
Though these two processes seem similar, they have several key differences:
Preventative vs. Control
- Quality Assurance: This is a proactive approach. It uses planned activities to meet product or service requirements. The goal is to prevent errors before they happen by focusing on the process.
- Quality Control: In comparison, this is a reactive approach. It involves checking whether the final product or service meets the specified criteria.
Focus on Process vs. Product
- Quality Assurance: Focuses more on preventing problems by looking at how things are made. This step identifies flaws that may result in substandard outcomes and works to enhance the process further.
- Quality Control: The quality control department tests the final product against specifications, finds any problems, and works to fix them. This helps businesses deliver a final outcome that meets quality standards.
Trust in the Making vs. Trust in the Final Product
- Quality Assurance: Builds confidence in an organization during the delivery of a product or service. It’s a proactive step that reassures the business that quality requirements will be met.
- Quality Control: This reactive process focuses on finding and fixing defects in finished products. It verifies that the final product meets specifications and builds confidence in the product.
Roles and Responsibilities
- Quality Assurance: Makes sure processes are designed and used to meet quality standards. This involves checking that procedures are understood and correctly carried out, identifying gaps, and helping to improve processes to prevent defects from occurring in the first place.
- Quality Control: This is more product-focused. It involves inspecting finished products for defects, taking corrective actions, and delivering products that meet quality specifications.
Planning vs. Inspection
- Quality Assurance: Involves planning and outlining quality measures before production starts. It sets clear guidelines and standards to prevent defects.
- Quality Control: Involves inspecting or checking the product after it’s made. This process verifies that the final product aligns with the standards and guidelines set during the quality assurance process.
How QA and QC Work Together in a QMS
When quality assurance and quality control work together in a QMS, they help maintain your business’s quality standards efficiently.
Here’s how they work together:
Coordinated Approach to Quality
These two approaches coordinate to support quality. Quality assurance focuses on the design and adherence to processes that prevent issues, while quality control verifies whether outputs conform to specified requirements. This dual approach helps to maintain quality at every stage of the process.
Reducing Errors and Waste
Quality assurance aims to correct any issues quickly so your business can save resources by preventing errors before they occur. Together with quality control, this can help to catch problems, prevent waste, and save money.
Continual Improvement
Both systems work together to identify opportunities for improvement, although there are differences in the role of quality assurance vs. quality control. When QC processes identify recurring issues, QA processes use that information to adjust systems and prevent the problem from happening again. This continual cycle of learning and improvement promotes a proactive culture of quality within an organization.
Risk Management
Both processes can detect potential and existing issues within your business, allowing you to mitigate risks related to poor quality. This joint effort can contribute to an effective risk assessment that can impact your brand’s reputation.
Increased Customer Satisfaction
Using both QA and QC across your QMS can lead to higher customer satisfaction. When customers know what they can expect from a business, they may be more likely to repurchase your product or revisit your service.
Competitive Advantage
Businesses prioritizing quality assurance and quality control processes may be more likely to deliver high-quality products or services consistently. This consistency can give organizations a competitive advantage—making your business the preferred choice for customers who value reliability.
Types of Quality Management Systems
ISO 9001 is an internationally recognised standard for quality management. It sets out the requirements for establishing, implementing, maintaining, and continually improving a Quality Management System (QMS). Built on key quality management principles, it focuses on customers, involves top management, uses a process approach, and aims for continual improvement.
While ISO 9001 is widely adopted, other standards for quality exist for specific industries. These include ISO 13485 for medical devices, IATF 16949 for the automotive sector, and AS9100 for the aerospace supplies industry.
Each of these standards integrates quality management principles tailored to their unique requirements, supporting organizations in applying quality management principles within their sector-specific contexts.
Read about the benefits of a Quality Management System.
How Modern Technology Makes Quality Management Easier
Automation tools and modern QMS software can boost the efficiency of QA and QC by streamlining repetitive tasks, promoting consistency, and minimizing errors. They provide real-time data for quick decision-making and proactive issue identification.
For example, Forbes has reported that the use of AI has had a strong impact on the field of QA, further enhancing its benefits.
It can support the QA process when it comes to automation for software developers, predictive analytics to avoid errors, UX testing, and code testing.
AI is also being integrated into Quality Management Systems, and is reported to be most useful in research and analysis, according to a recent industry report.
Automation tools can encourage collaboration and alignment with business goals by improving compliance and integrating with other business systems. With routine tasks automated, employees can focus on strategic improvements, supporting continual improvement initiatives and the scalability of quality standards as the business evolves.
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