Quality Assurance vs Quality Control Understanding Nonconformance and How to Address It
Quality Management involves processes and activities that ensure the project meets the desired level of quality standards. It involves identifying quality requirements, defining quality standards, and implementing measures to meet or exceed them throughout the project lifecycle. Quality management includes activities such as quality planning, quality assurance, and quality control. It aims to prevent defects, monitor project processes and deliverables, and continuously improve the project’s quality. Project quality management aims to meet customer expectations, enhance stakeholder satisfaction, and achieve the project’s objectives with a focus on delivering a high-quality result. This blog discusses the difference between quality assurance and quality control by understanding non-conformity. So let’s get started!
Why is Quality Assurance and Quality Control Important to the Organization?
Quality Assurance is a systematic approach to ensure that an organization maintains a certain performance level and meets internal customer support standards. While an increase in sales might provide a short-term shot in the arm, quality assurance can secure the long-term health of your organization. Quality Assurance can fuel the underlying factors that feed into sales, while also improving other aspects of your organization. QA can enhance customer satisfaction, improve customer retention, streamline operations, and much more.
A proper system of quality control ensures a smooth flow of production. It minimizes delays and stoppages. Consumers readily accept goods of standard quality. Good quality control helps to reduce rejection. A system of quality control develops quality consciousness among the workers. Quality control improves the productivity of the organization. A proper system of it increases the output of quality goods. It also helps to find out quality deviation from the established standard. For further clarification, Quality Assurance vs Quality Control is as follows-
Quality Assurance vs Quality Control
- Quality Assurance is a part of quality management focused on providing confidence that quality requirements will be fulfilled, while quality Control is a part of quality management focused on fulfilling quality requirements.
- Quality Assurance is defined as all the planned and systematic activities implemented within the quality system that can be demonstrated to provide confidence that a product or service will fulfil quality requirements. Whereas, Quality Control is defined as the operational techniques and activities employed to meet quality requirements.
- Quality Assurance measures are defined as all the planned and systematic activities implemented within the quality system that can be demonstrated to provide confidence that a product or service will fulfil quality requirements. Whereas, Quality Control is defined as the operational techniques and activities used to fulfil quality requirements.
- Quality Assurance is fundamentally focused on planning and documenting processes to assure quality, including quality plans and inspection and test plans. Quality Control, on the other hand, is the physical verification that the product conforms to these planned arrangements by inspection, measurement, etc.
- Quality Assurance is a system for evaluating performance, service, or the quality of a product against a system, standard, or specified customer requirement. Quality Control is the process involved within the system to ensure job management, competence, and performance during the manufacturing of the product or service to ensure it meets the quality plan as designed.
- Quality Assurance involves the prevention of quality problems through planned and systematic activities, including documentation. It focuses on establishing a better quality management system and assessing its adequacy through conformance audits of the operating system and the review of the system itself. On the other hand, Quality Control refers to the activities or techniques used to achieve and maintain product quality, process quality and service quality.
- Quality Assurance establishes a good quality management system and the assessment of its adequacy which also performs periodic confirmance audits of the operations of the system to make sure that everything is in place as per organization design. But Quality Control finds and eliminates sources of detected quality problems through tools and equipment.
- Quality control and quality assurance use statistical techniques but they are different as in quality control statistical tools and techniques are applied to finished product process outputs and they are called statistical quality control SQC. But in quality assurance statistical tools and techniques are applied to process inputs and operational parameters and they are called statistical process control SPC.
- Quality Assurance primarily focuses on planning and documenting those processes to ensure including quality plans and inspection and test plans. Quality Assurance is a complete system to assure the quality of products or services. It is not only a process but a complete system including control. It is a way of management. Quality control is used to verify the quality of the output or product by identifying defects. Quality control identifying and correcting defects in the final product. So it is a reactive process as it deals with the output of the process after being developed.
Quality control focuses on identifying and correcting defects in the final product.
What is Non-conformance?
Nonconformance is a sign that something went wrong in a product, process, service or system by not meeting a certain set of specifications. Non-conformances can be effectively handled within a quality management solution. The system that products meet quality standards through an automated workflow. If any non-conforming material is identified, corrective or preventative actions can be put into place if needed. When an issue arises, a non-conformance document is generated within the system to record the details of the non-conforming material. Many terms could be used with a non-conformance document, but the big three are defect, cause, and disposition.
When a non-conformance is generated, it identifies that a defect was observed. The cause of the defect, if known, is recorded as well. Best practices and quality require clearly defined compliance standards and inspection criteria to reduce the occurrence of non-conformance. It is critical to maintain tight control of your supply chain quality, as it is an extension of your brand.
How to address Non-conformity in the Organization?
Sometimes the term ‘non-conformance’ can have a bit of a negative connotation, which results in some listeners being defensive. You can identify non-conformance using any of the following methods, analyzing monitoring forms such as check sheets and reports, customer complaints, observation of work practices, and feedback from audits. Monitoring procedures form an essential component of food safety procedures as they indicate whether control measures and critical limits are being achieved. A customer complaint procedure should be implemented as part of the quality procedures. The procedure should include the reporting, recording and resolving of customer complaints.
Conclusion
An effective quality management solution can help companies streamline processes and automate quality tasks that can be extended to the supply chain. If a non-conformance does occur, the system will help identify the root cause and quickly resolve the issue. This was a brief representation of quality assurance and quality control, determining why they are important to the organization. With non-conformances under control, companies will be on a solid path to continuous improvement.
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