Quality assurance or quality control

When I am working with companies one of the most difficult conversations I have with them is the fundamental one that I am going to talk about in this post. It forms the basis of their vision, aims, objectives, indeed their ability to deliver on their commitment to their customers to provide safe and legal product that meets the customer's requirements in terms of quality too.

I start the conversation with the question "Are you a company that believes in quality assurance or quality control?". I am not talking about the label that people wear on their overalls and work clothing, I am talking about the ethos of the company. What I mean is "Tell me whether you are an organisation that believes in failure prevention or failure detection?"

Quality control is about failure detection, it involves developing a testing system to identify when things have gone wrong and often involves end product testing at a determined frequency. The problem with having a system based on failure detection is that you have to test at a frequency that is realistic, otherwise the cost of the testing outweighs the benefits to the organisation, and if you only test one in a hundred deliveries how do you know the other ninety-nine were ok? The next problem that an organisation has is that once you have detected failure what do you do? Well if it is a short duration food it may already have been eaten by some consumers by the time you get the test results back, if it is a manufactured item you may have already sold the other ninety-nine batches before you get the result for the hundredth. This summer particularly has illustrated this point only to well with the series of product recalls that have happened many on a global scale, but what has been the cost to organisations not only the cost of the actual physical recall, but also in terms of brand equity?

End product testing should be a last resort for organisations, it should be a final check that all the other quality processes before that point have been working correctly, a belt and braces test if you like rather than the only quality inspection point in the process. In terms of quality assurance, we would call it verification, it is definitely not a form of monitoring. Ah, another lively debate I have with organisations "what is the difference between monitoring and verification?"

Quality assurance is about failure prevention, it is about determining with your suppliers, internal work colleagues and customers all the things that could go wrong with regards to product safety, legality and meeting quality attributes. Once you have defined all these criteria it is about defining where in the supply chain those criteria have to be adequately controlled to prevent unsafe or out of specification items or services reaching the next point of the supply chain. It is about real-time monitoring during the process when you have time to correct problems, or indeed if need be reject product before it gets to the next stage in the process. This is nothing new, Quality Gurus have been writing about this approach since the 1950s, but many organisations seem to be half-way between quality assurance and quality control in a "no-man's land of quality".

So who is responsible for product safety and quality in the organisation? What resources do they have? Is the Quality department seen as a cost or a benefit by the management team and work-force? Is the Quality department seen as the police force, the enforcers or as the advisors, the enablers? Fundamental difficult questions, that every organisation should ask!