Quality is, indeed, a broader aspect to understand than what it sounds. Quality Assurance, Quality Control, and Quality Management are commonly used terminologies by organizations with respect to the quality of their products and services. However, implementing a quality management software simplifies the quality operations for every industry.
This post will help you understand each of them in detail. Let’s quickly start with their definitions:
It basically refers to the section of quality management that ensures the quality requirements are fulfilled – in compliance with regulatory standards as well as customer expectations. Alternatively, we can define quality assurance as a planned and systematic implementation of certain activities required to fulfil quality requirements, building trust for the brand among the potential as well as existing customers without fail.
It can be defined as a set of procedures implemented to ensure that a product to be delivered or a service is to be performed complies with the quality criteria defined by the company and the requirements of the customers. This is the process to review the quality in every aspect of the production that solely focusses on the defined requirements. It is quite similar to quality assurance, but it focusses more on operational activities – whether they are in order. It is often referred to as the inspection process in quality management.
It ensures that an organization is maintaining consistency through its products and services. It comprises of four key components including Quality Planning, Quality Assurance, Quality Control, and Quality Improvement. It focuses on end-to-end processes from the quality of products and services to the activities and means accustomed to attaining it and managing it in a consistent fashion. It can be rightly referred to as a comprehensive phenomenon that has become significantly important for every organization.
Therefore, Quality Assurance and Quality Control makes a significant part of and plays a key role in overall Quality Management System .
Many people use the term Quality Management and Quality Control alternatively because of their perception that QC takes care of the planning aspect as well. This perception is true especially for the organizations that don’t have individual departments for QC and quality planning. Nevertheless, it is important for every organization to have properly designated quality teams and departments to take care of every aspect with complete attention to cope and comply with the quality standards growing stringent with the time.
Thanks to the advanced quality management software, many organizations have found a successful way to manage every process from planning to quality assurance without any hassles. Both QM and QC process requires a certain set of tools to ensure quality.
Though quality control and quality management have the functional difference, they rely on a basic set of principles specified by the International Standard for Quality Management (ISO 9001: 2015) to enable organizations with improved performance.
The primary focus should be on the customers only. An organization should adopt the right measures and technologies to meet customer requirements while continuously striving to exceed their expectations in terms of quality.
A qualitative leadership is required to ensure that all the people of the organization are working towards the quality objectives and goals set by the company. However, leadership comes with a great responsibility to keep every team member onto the right track.
Engagement of your people is very important to keep them competent and empowered towards organizational objectives. Active engagement will also enhance their capability to deliver value for the customers.
If you want to maintain the consistency with the quality deliverables, it is very important that you have well-defined processes in your organization to be understood by your team. It will simplify the overall quality management function for them.
“If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.” This quote from Henry Ford suits well for the improvement aspect. For a successful business, it is important for organizations to focus on continuous improvement even if it calls for change management.
Making informed decisions is key to produce great results. And, to make informed decisions, it is important to analyze and evaluate the data generated. Organizations may use a reliable audit management system for detailed analysis to make factual-data based decisions.
Any organization needs to manage its relationships with suppliers, vendors, as well as customers for continued success. They should focus on relationship management with all the parties involved in their production and post-production operations.
Criticism also makes a considerable factor, though it’s not listed in the quality management principles.In fact, Winston Churchill said “Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfill the same function as pain in the human body; it calls attention to the development of an unhealthy state of things. If it is heeded in time, the danger may be averted; if it is suppressed, a fatal distemper may develop.” So, you must consider criticism a key to unlock new opportunities to improve and grow. Get a customer complaints management system to process feedback from your customers. You should also consider team feedback when it comes to quality improvement.
The results that you get from Quality Control like Measurements, Validated changes, Updates for planning, change requests, Lessons learned, and Validated deliverable help simplify the quality management to a large extent.
No matter how many differences we can count between the two, Quality Control and Quality Management are the processes to be carried out in a synchronized way to get the desired results.
The process of Quality Control and Quality Management are inevitable for sustainable success of an organization. Putting them together makes your organization more effective and efficient to achieve the desired quality that can meet customer requirements and adhere to the compliance standards while ensuring that industry best practices are followed.
Get Qualityze, the cloud-based EQMS Software, to bring Quality Control and Management processes together that will drive continual improvement while improving the process quality and mitigating operational risks.
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