Difference Between Quality Assurance and Quality Control
In a corporate firm that deals with production, marketing and sales of any merchandise or a product, system, process or service etc. maintaining the quality is of utmost important for each and every employee. As far as maintaining the quality is concerned, quality assurance and quality control are the two types of terms that a person comes across every now and then. Although these terms appear to mean one and the same thing, yet there lie some basic differences between them, the common factor being making the firm competent in comparison to the other competitors in the field as far as the quality is concerned. Both the terms employ different means in order to achieve the goal of maintaining the proper quality of the concerned firm.
Quality control is all about controlling and examining the quality of the merchandise or a product that has been manufactured by the company and quality assurance is the procedure by which an organisation (who is the pioneer in particular fields of evaluation eg. NABL etc) gives a certificate of assurance or rather its guarantee to the company to certify that the equipments and procedures of the company up do date, efficient and competent enough for the purpose of producing that particular merchandise. Quality control is all about finding the flaws and the fallacies in the production procedure that is followed and then making amendments so that the product quality can be improved and Quality assurance is all about Assuring that the procedures that the company follows in order to produce the particular product is up to date and meets the international standards or not. If we chalk out the differences in a very concise way, we can say that quality control is related to the product and quality assurance deals with the procedure followed to produce the product.
The requirements of a project, i.e. the methodology and the fact whether the project is carried out with standards that are properly defined and acceptable are the basic lookout of quality assurance department and these factors play an important part in an quality assurance review.
If a firm has the Quality assurance certificate from an internationally accepted organisation, it ensures the buyers in the market that the procedure followed by that company in order to produce the product is right and up to the international standards, whole Quality control procedure makes sure that the end product of the procedure is as per the liking and desires of the manufacturer and buyers in the market. Quality assurance makes sure that the procedure of production develops as per the changes and the advancements happening in worldwide, while this development ultimately affects the quality i.e quality control procedures. One needs to obtain the Quality assurance from a recognised organisation before undertaking any kind of project related to production while quality control procedure come into existence after the project has actually started.
However, in spite of the differences between the two, the two terms are dependent on each other for the proper functioning of the firm and desirable quality of the product. This is because, the quality assurance is obtained only when the assuring authority is satisfied with the feedback it receives either from the consumer/buyer as regards the product, or from the inspecting authority sent to inspect the procedures as well as the quality control procedure followed for the purpose of product production.