Quality Assurance vs. Quality Control: The Key Differences
Every business wants to deliver high-quality goods and services to its customers. To do this, companies adopt various quality management processes to ensure products meet specific standards. Two notable processes are quality assurance (QA) and quality control (QC).
Quality assurance refers to the processes implemented during product development to ensure that standards are met and defects are prevented before they occur. In contrast, quality control is reactive, focusing on the final product or service by testing and inspecting the end result and certifying that it meets all quality requirements. While QA and QC often overlap, there are some key differences.
| Quality Assurance | Quality Control |
|---|---|
| Performs quality checks before and during the production cycle | Tests and identifies defects after production is complete |
| Proactive - implanted throughout production process | Reactive - performed after product development |
| Process is continuous and ongoing | Occurs at specific points, usually near completion |
| Goal is to improve create internal improvements | Goal is to satisfy customers |
What is Quality Assurance?
Quality assurance (QA) checks quality requirements before and during the production cycle to ensure each product meets production standards. This can mean reviewing the various steps of the manufacturing or assembly process or performing audits on different parts to find improvement areas.
The proactive goal in quality assurance is for goods and services to meet customer expectations. By regularly reviewing production methods, your company can perfect processes over time to reduce the likelihood of errors occurring. Using quality assurance practices leaves consumers with high-quality goods and services they will want to buy repeatedly.
What is Quality Control?
Quality control is similar to assurance, although it measures the quality of individual goods made through mass production. Manufacturers can find errors before goods are sent on to retailers or consumers through regular production audits and product sampling. Just as QA is part of larger QMS, QC is sometimes seen as a subset of QA.
By using QC to review and standardize production methods, you can ensure each product meets the same standards each and every time. Without QC, you might not discover a problem with your product until consumers complain or demand refunds.
Project management uses quality control to determine whether a project has met the agreed-upon standards set by the client or the company. In these circumstances, the term has a slightly different meaning, as the end result is not compared to an initial prototype or production run.
How Are Quality Assurance and Control Different?
The key difference between quality assurance and control is when they audit various products and production methods for quality. QA is mainly about finding the best processes for consistently making products, while QC only identifies issues in production after they have occurred. In short, QA prevents errors from happening, while QC follows through on checking the results of QA.
For instance, imagine a manufacturer assembling brightly colored toy robots. Quality assurance would look to identify the best way to apply paint and complete each piece before mass manufacturing begins. This practice is mainly preventative, trying to stop potential errors from happening at all. A QA manager might run independent tests of various parts, such as batteries, to see if they work consistently and suggest changes when necessary. Finally, quality control would perform inspections of individual items within completed batches to ensure each finished product looks and operates as intended. If one of the toys does not have coloring as bright as advertised, production would need to shut down to fix the issue.
Additionally, assurance and control operate on different time scales. QA looks at the overall manufacturing process to find ways to improve all processes for better results. QC is intended to catch issues after production is complete and make corrections as fast as possible to resume production.
Which Quality Process is Best?
Your business should implement quality assurance and control practices to prevent errors and ensure high-quality conformance on deliverables. When working together, they can prevent low-quality goods from reaching your customers. By consistently meeting customer requirements, you can increase their satisfaction.
Both quality control and assurance utilize similar methods for quality management, like:
- Agile
- Corrective and preventative action (CAPA)
- First article inspection (FAI)
- Six Sigma
- Lean Six Sigma
- Statistical process control (SPC)
- Statistical quality control (SQC)
Each quality planning method has different ways of improving QA and QC. For instance, ISO 9000 regulations are among the top standards for quality management systems. In order to meet ISO compliance, organizations must get third-party certification. Having good QA and QC in place can help make that certification possible.
