Quality Compliance vs. Management: How Compliance Leads to Quality
Quality compliance and management can significantly impact your company’s operations, customer satisfaction, and overall success. Many businesses use these terms interchangeably. Yet, their subtle differences make for some important distinctions regarding how you run your business.
What is Quality Compliance?
Quality compliance meets safety and security regulations set by government agencies or the industry. Standards may range from how an item can be manufactured to proper storage conditions. Failure to comply with these standards can lead to fines, legal violations, and even production shutdowns. This is all done to protect consumers and end-users of products and services.
Regulatory compliance standards may be set by organizations such as:
- Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
- International Organization for Standardization (ISO)
- Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points (HAACP)
- North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC)
- Sanitation Standard Operating Procedures (SSOP)
More specific organizations also vary depending on industry or country of origin. Within these organizations are a variety of safety standards, often based on industry specifics. For example, the FDA uses a series of regulatory requirements labeled Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) to regulate food, drugs, and cosmetics to ensure consumer safety.
What is Quality Management?
In slight contrast, quality management systems (QMS), sometimes called quality assurance, involve improving and perfecting a business’s production methods and setting its standards for what products are acceptable. The goal is to provide consumers with high-quality goods and services they want to continue using.
For instance, quality management software might use modules to regulate Corrective and Preventive Action (CAPA) processes, which correct nonconformances that may occur during production.
While quality management can improve product development, it can also appease stakeholders by increasing consumer satisfaction and, in turn, profitability. The better your quality processes, the better your product and services can be.
How Are They Similar?
Quality management and compliance aim to ensure that products or services meet quality standards. They overlap significantly in trying to produce high-quality products and services for customers.
How Are They Different?
One key way to tell the two apart is who is in control of the quality: compliance focuses on meeting standards set by others, while management focuses on setting and maintaining internal standards to improve customer satisfaction and, in turn, potential profits.
Knowing this distinction makes it easier to understand each goal when it comes to production. Compliance is aimed at keeping your company in good standing regarding consumer safety and manufacturing regulations. Management would look for ways to automate production methods to be as efficient and effective as possible, delivering high-quality products to your customers consistently.
These differences can lead to different priorities when planning your supply chain, manufacturing, delivery, or sales methods. In most businesses, a compliance manager would ensure a company operates within all necessary regulations and standards. In contrast, a quality manager would look for ways to improve current processes to save time and money. The compliance manager would seek new information on new and changing safety standards set by government organizations or specific industry groups. They would then check the company is always operating within those standards. In contrast, the quality manager would look at opportunities to optimize internal processes based on employee or customer feedback.
Which Quality System Is Best?
Whether you need a quality compliance or management system will largely depend on your industry and internal company goals. A quality management system would be the best choice for improving your manufacturing processes. Higher-quality products can lead to more effective production by eliminating errors, and lowering overall costs. You can also implement a quality compliance system, which will help avoid potential violations and expensive fines.
It’s common for businesses to utilize both since just about every business will need to comply with some government agency’s safety regulations. As such, you will need a system to manage your compliance. Yet you’ll also want to provide your customers with the best goods and services, necessitating a quality management system.
For example, consider a healthcare provider who manufactures medical devices. They will need to meet quality compliance with ISO 13485, a voluntary standard covering medical devices. Yet this standard also promotes continual improvement, which can influence quality management. So, any company manufacturing medical devices would operate best with a system for both management and compliance.
