Quality Assurance vs Quality Control – What’s the Difference?

Quality management is crucial, regardless of your business type or sector. Maintaining high standards across products and services ensures client and partner satisfaction while meeting compliance and legislative requirements. There are two key aspects to achieving and maintaining quality – quality assurance and quality control.

But what’s the difference between quality assurance vs quality control?

What Is Quality Assurance?

Quality assurance is a comprehensive framework that integrates with all operational aspects of an organization.

It sets out a clear framework for the production, testing, and delivery stages of a product or service, making it applicable to a broad range of industries, from software to retail.

Quality assurance’s primary aim is to mitigate risks. It achieves this by identifying potential issues early on and preventing them from happening. This is a crucial component of the value chain, as it reduces the number of defects detected during the final stages of inspection.

Detecting defects in the end stages of production can make rectification more complex and costly. So, quality assurance can enhance efficiency and cost-effectiveness by ensuring quality at every step of the process.

What Is Quality Control?

Quality control is more of a reactive approach, focusing on identifying and addressing defects in finished products. This process ensures that product outcomes align with the established specifications.

While quality control typically occurs at the end of production, it can also be implemented at various stages throughout the process if needed. This stage is critical as it enables businesses to identify and rectify any issues with their product or service before it reaches consumers. By doing so, quality control helps to ensure customer satisfaction and maintain the brand’s reputation for quality.

Manufacturing, construction, software, and food production are all examples of industries where quality control might be required. In an organization producing food and drink, this could involve defining and inspecting ingredients, ensuring products meet health and safety regulations, and adhering to packaging and labeling standards.

Quality Assurance vs Quality Control – What Is the Difference?

So, what are the differences between quality assurance vs quality control?

Although the two processes are similar, they have several differences, as these quality assurance vs quality control examples show:

Preventative vs Control

• Quality Assurance – This is a proactive approach. It involves a set of planned and systematic activities designed to fulfill the requirements for a product or service. The objective is to prevent errors while focusing on the process.
• Quality Control – In comparison, this is a reactive approach. It involves examining the product or service to check whether it meets the specified criteria.

Focus on Process vs Product

• Quality Assurance – Focuses more on preventing faults by examining the process leading to the end product. This step identifies flaws that may result in substandard outcomes and works to enhance the process further.
• Quality Control – Tests the final product against the specifications, identifies any faults with the product or service and works on fixing them. This helps to ensure that the final outcome meets the desired quality standards.

Confidence in Delivery Processes vs Confidence in Production Output

• Quality Assurance – Instills confidence in an organization during the delivery of a product or service. It serves as a proactive measure and reassures the business that the final product’s quality requirements will be fulfilled.
• Quality Control – This reactive process focuses on identifying and correcting defects in the finished product, ensuring that the final product meets the desired specifications. It offers confidence during the production process itself.

Roles and Responsibilities

• Quality Assurance – This ensures that processes are designed and implemented to meet the organization’s quality standards. This involves verifying that procedures are accurately 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. This involves inspecting the final product for defects and non-conformance to specifications. Its role is to identify defects in finished products, take corrective actions, and ensure that the product meets the quality specifications.

Planning vs Inspection

• Quality Assurance – Involves planning and outlining quality measures that should be part of the process before production. It sets clear guidelines and standards to prevent defects.
• Quality Control – Involves inspecting or checking the product after its production. This process ensures that the final product aligns with the standards and guidelines set during the quality assurance process.

Where Does Quality Management Fit in?

Quality management helps organizations achieve greater consistency when producing different products and services. Implementing an efficient quality management process reduces wastage and helps to control costs. It also improves the use of time and other resources and ensures that your services are of high quality for customers. This can help your business build a positive reputation, potentially attracting new customers and retaining existing ones.

A Quality Management System (QMS) encompasses four key components:

• Quality Planning – This involves the establishment of processes and resources needed to achieve quality objectives, and setting the objectives and requirements for quality.
• Quality Assurance – A systematic process of checking that services and products meet requirements by ensuring through systematic activities that quality requirements are fulfilled.
• Quality Control – This involves testing that products or services are of high quality and free of defects.
• Quality Improvement – This aspect of a QMS is dedicated to continuous improvement, to enhance the quality level of products and services on a regular basis.

Quality management effectively sits above considerations about quality assurance vs quality control—providing a system that incorporates both to monitor, improve, and implement processes that drive quality standards.

ISO 9001: How Quality Assurance and Quality Control Work Together

What Is ISO 9001?

ISO 9001 is a global standard that provides a framework for companies to establish a QMS, enhancing efficiency and uncovering new business opportunities.

Becoming ISO 9001 certified demonstrates an organization’s commitment to consistently delivering high-quality products and services and its dedication to continuous improvement. An effective QMS can boost stakeholder and client confidence, improve processes, and help your business develop new strategic leadership abilities.

What Are the Benefits of ISO 9001?

• Identify and control quality risks
• Ensure client satisfaction
• Achieve operational excellence
• Enhanced employee satisfaction
• Demonstrate compliance with regulation
• Identify cost-saving opportunities through efficiencies

Discover our ISO 9001 training courses and learn how your business can achieve ISO 9001 certification.

 

How Do They Work Together in an ISO 9001 QMS?

The combination of quality assurance and quality control in an ISO 9001 QMS ensures an efficient approach to maintaining your business’s quality standards.

Here is how they work together to keep this approach:

Coordinated Approach to Quality

The two systems work together by coordinating an approach to quality. Although quality assurance focuses on creating an effective system and processes to prevent issues, quality control checks the final product to ensure it meets specified criteria. This dual approach ensures quality is maintained throughout each 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. Coupled with the quality control process, this can help catch any issues, prevent waste and lead to cost savings.

Continuous Improvement

Both systems work together to identify opportunities for improvement, though there are differences in the role of quality assurance vs quality control. Where quality control processes identify recurring issues, quality assurance processes will take this data, investigate how to adjust any system and work on a new way to prevent this from repeating. This is a continuous step for ongoing improvements, promoting 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 have an impact on your brand’s reputation.

Increased Customer Satisfaction

The use of quality assurance and quality control 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.

Get started on your journey to ISO 9001 certification – Get a quote today or contact our team to discuss your needs.