Quality management is usually divided into two stages: quality control (QC) and quality assurance (QA).
In some small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises, quality control personnel often have two roles, while doing QA and QC work.Balingsteel provides strict QA and QC inspection for each Nigerian customer, while cooperating with customers to conduct third-party final inspection and provide third-party professional reports.
01Definition of QA and QC
1, QA– Quality assurance
Definition: All planned and systematic activities implemented in the quality management system to provide sufficient confidence that the entity is able to meet quality requirements and to carry out verified activities as required.
Generally include:
QE (Quality Engineer) Quality engineer
DQA (Design QA) Design quality assurance
DQE (Design QE) Development Quality Engineer
PQE (Process/Product QE) Product quality engineer
Supplier QE (SQE) Supplier Quality Engineer
CQE (Customer/Client QE) Customer Quality Engineer
JQE (Joint QE) client quality engineer
That is, the quality engineers paid by the supplier to work for the customer are the eyes and ears of the customer’s SQE.
2, QC– Quality control
Definition: In order to meet the quality requirements of the operation technology and activities, product quality inspection, found quality problems after the analysis, improvement and nonconforming product control personnel.
Generally include:
QC: QualityControl
IQC (Incoming QC) Incoming quality control
IPQC (In-Process QC) process control
FQC (Final QC) Finished product quality inspection
OQC (Outgoing QC) Outgoing inspection of finished products
DQC (Design QC) Design quality control
MQC (Manufacture QC) Manufacture QC
By definition, QA focuses on the establishment, maintenance and improvement of the entire quality management system.
The QC is mainly product quality inspection, but also includes the control of product-related people, environment and equipment.
02The difference between QA and QC
1, QC
QC is the operation technology and activities taken to make the product meet the quality requirements, including inspection, correction and feedback.
For example, QC will eliminate the defective products after inspection, and then feedback the bad information to the relevant departments to take improvement measures.
Therefore, the control scope of QC is mainly in the factory, and its purpose is to prevent the input of unqualified products, transsequencing, leaving the factory, ensuring that the products meet the quality requirements, and only qualified products can be delivered to customers.
- QA
QA is about providing trust to meet the customer’s requirements, even if the customer is confident that the product you are providing will meet his requirements.
The purpose of QA is not to ensure product quality, ensuring product quality is the task of QC.
QA is mainly to provide assurance, so it needs to start from market research, understand customer requirements, review customer requirements, product development, order and material procurement, incoming inspection, production process control and shipment, and the whole process of after-sales service management.
This requires enterprises to establish a quality control system, formulate documents, regulate the activities of each process, and leave evidence of implementation, confirming that every step of the factory’s activities are carried out according to customer requirements in order to provide trust.
Externally reassure customers that the factory is producing and delivering products to their requirements; Internal let the boss rest assured, because the boss is the first responsible person for product quality, the boss should take full responsibility for product quality accidents.
This is also a major requirement of national product quality laws, so in order to avoid quality responsibility, the boss must document the activities and leave evidence.
However, it is impossible for the boss to know whether the internal staff of the factory are operating according to the requirements of the documents, which requires QA to conduct an audit on his behalf to understand whether the documents are complied with.
3, difference and same
QA needs to know not only what went wrong, but also how to develop solutions to those problems and how to prevent them in the future.
QC should know how to control the problem, but not necessarily know why to control it.
To make an inappropriate analogy, the QC is the police, the QA is the judge, and the QC only has to arrest those who break the law, which does not prevent others from committing crimes and ultimately convict others.
The judge makes the law to prevent crime and decides the outcome according to the law.
So the main differences between QC and QA are:
The former is to ensure that the quality of the product meets the regulations, the latter is to establish the system and ensure that the system works as required to provide internal and external trust.
At the same time, QC and QA have the same point: that is, both QC and QA need to be verified.
If QC tests the product according to the standard, it is to verify whether the product meets the specified requirements, and QA conducts internal audit, it is to verify whether the operation of the system meets the standard requirements.
For example, QA conducts shipment audit and reliability testing, which is to verify whether the product has carried out various activities in accordance with the regulations and whether it can meet the specified requirements, so as to ensure that the products delivered by the factory are qualified and comply with the relevant regulations.
03Why do we need QA and QC
QC is the most basic part of quality control, including all inspection work.
QA includes QC, the core of which is to control quality. However, it goes beyond inspection to include related work like training, document management and auditing.
Quality management is a broader scope that encompasses not only QA and QC, but also the thinking and management of quality systems.
When a manufacturer sells a product, it is often claimed that the quality is good, so it is their responsibility to make sure that the quality of the product is really as good as he says.
Therefore, QC is needed to test the quality of products in each production link.
However, only QC inspection is far from enough, someone must stand in a holistic perspective to control all the links related to the production of the product.
These links include the quality of raw materials, the quality of factory operation, the quality of equipment and instruments, the quality of production and inspection.
If any link is missing, the quality of the product cannot be ensured.
Therefore, the establishment of QA and QC is to make customers satisfied and play a “win-win” role for enterprises and consumers.
04Establish QA and QC
Both QA and QC are an integral part of the quality management system.The quality of the QA and QC system does not entirely depend on the complexity of the system, nor does it say that the more stringent the system is the better, for different companies, it must be analyzed on a case-by-case basis.
1, the system must have strong operability.
If a smaller company is required to build a system like a large company, the system will eventually fail, because there is simply not enough cost and manpower to undertake the corresponding tasks.
Therefore, the establishment of the quality management system should avoid “taking the doctrine”, and its purpose should be to promote the development of enterprises, so that enterprises can avoid the loss and waste caused by poor quality, so as to create profits and quality for enterprises.
2, the establishment of the system should be preventative, so that the product is minimally dependent on the final product testing.
Pre-management is more important than post-management, which is often said that “prevention first”.
Enterprises are the same, and not to wait for the finished product to be made, check the unqualified and then discard, but should be found as soon as possible in the problem.
3, the whole system should have a strong self-improvement function.
The so-called self-improvement is to be able to make timely and appropriate adjustments according to the exposed problems, so as to make the system more and more perfect.
If QC personnel find that the site reject rate is very high, should immediately investigate, if necessary, stop production and report to QA.
QA should organize an investigation team in time to investigate the cause of the problem, formulate corrective and preventive measures, and track and confirm the effect of the measures.
Therefore, while solving the problem of scrap rate, the system itself is constantly improving, thus forming a virtuous cycle process.
