As important as quality should be in any company, it still remains a buzz word to many. Quality Assurance (QA) and Quality Control (QC) seem to be used synonymously. In this post I will attempt to define the difference between QA and QC, and the importance each role has.
In organizations with enough employees to have a quality department, the quality department usually controls most aspects of quality . These include managing the Quality Management System (QMS), creating and maintaining quality assurance plans, ensuring inspectors are screening parts for engineering conformance, monitoring product output and process capability, and auditing to procedures and standards.
With all these responsibilities there are clearly multiple roles within quality. Because of this, each role must contribute in different ways to cover the wide range of requirements.
There are two ways to ensure process outputs meet the intended output. The first step is defining output requirements (e.g. design drawings) and the second step is to define the process, typically using a procedure. Both of these fill the Quality Assurance (QA) role. QA covers the documentation and established rules for creating the output. Anything related to establishing the means and path to the desired outcome is covered under quality assurance. To contrast this, there is a screening process for all of the outputs created by QA. This is called Quality Control (QC)
Once a process has created outputs, the outputs should be inspected to verify it meets the original requirement. The Quality Control role fills the responsibility for auditing products (e.g. inspection). QC can be thought of as the gate keeper that filters out all products that should not travel on to the customer unless it meets engineering requirements.
The undefined bridge between Quality Assurance and the Quality Control is manufacturing. This is what I like to refer to as the Quality Making Department.