Introduction
Quality Assurance optimizes the quality of goods and services, but most organizations experience challenges when they perform quality control because of the difficulty in developing a proper tool that responds to their quality culture, thereby accentuating the already prevalent testing problems during quality control.
Literature Review
Differences between Quality Assurance and Quality Control
The blurry line between quality assurance and quality control is the quintessence of discrepancies in evaluations and standards. The guiding concepts in the two undertakings vary despite the procedural similarity. Both occur within quality management. While the former covers the overall quality system, the latter is a subcategory of Quality Assurance initiatives. The misty boundary between quality assurance (QA) and quality control (QC) stems from the peculiarity of their interaction point within a quality assessment system. It may miss the activities that QA and QC burden even though the QA and QC responsibilities remain necessary.
Quality assurance is a category of quality management that emphasizes providing confidence regarding the fulfillment of quality requirements through internal and external strategies. Internal strategies respond to the administration, whereas external frameworks respond to certifiers, third parties, government agencies, and clients. On the other hand, Quality control is a subset of quality management that stresses fulfilling quality requirements. Overall, QA guides the process performance during product manufacturing or service provision, and quality control implies the oversight aspect of quality management. The vitality of recognizing the difference between QA and Quality Control lies in the circumvention of procedural inconsistencies throughout the steps.
Role of Collaboration in Quality Assurance
QA previously occurred within the confines of organizational procedures and standards. However, the process often occurred in collaboration with external partners. Consequentially, similar products and service types from different brands had varying qualities and value for the clients. Developing cross-organizational collaboration frameworks took a lot of work because of the luxuriance in setup. The recent nascence of QA agencies requires the creation of an environment that conduces to transparent evaluation procedures that mirror regulatory requirements. Inter-agency collaboration remains essential to standard development, but government surveillance and business competition create unprecedented challenges (Trifiro, 2018). Technology integration is an intervention that can enhance collaboration by establishing a transparent and authenticated blended network of strategies that ensure the same standards for organizations that operate within the same industry.
Role of Quality Control in Quality Assurance
Quality Control (QC) instantiates a combination of processes that guarantee a product or service suffices the predetermined quality requirements. For this reason, an agency should determine the standards of service or goods before undertaking QC. Similarly, determining the expanse of quality control initiatives, such as the testing amount for each category. Data collection is another essential undertaking during QC, for instance, the percentage of defective products or the frequency of service delivery problems like delays. A prescription of salutary actions follows data gathering to ensure uniformity of standards in tandem with quality requirements. QC is a perpetual process because products and services evolve simultaneously with the client’s ever-changing needs and preferences.
The internationalization of Quality Assurance at the organizational level is gaining widespread acceptance. However, there are concerns about the feasibility and effectiveness of the procedure. Inspection is a standard process with specific intricacies when applied to QA and QC, and collaborating organizations usually need help with clashing standards and transparency issues. Inspection refers to the procedures of measuring, assessing, and testing to evaluate the features of a service or product against a backdrop of specified requirements to gauge conformity in the context of quality control. Auditing implies comparing a product or service with the requirements of a preset standard and reporting the findings to management. As such, a subtle difference between auditing and inspection arises because the two functions are independent. Unlike inspection, auditing occurs concurrently with verification activities determining the soundness of a service or product. Considering inspection as an evaluation tool during auditing processes reveals the difference between QA and QC and their relationship.
Significance of Quality Assurance in Product and Service Quality
QA guarantees the perpetual production and control of goods and services according to quality requirements that suffice their utility. Another importance of the process is ensuring that organizations follow a compliant marketing and promotion strategy. Many organizations need help to create a quality culture instrument because of varying institutional needs and the internationalization of standards. Learning institutions function within a competitive environment due to growing demands for quality teaching in service and research for administration. Learning institutions deliver services that are difficult to appraise on the surface view. Service entities are labor and performance-intensive, and managers attempt to keep turnover rates at a minimum. The development of a proper measuring tool during the evaluation of the quality of a service has a different dimension than a product’s. Nonetheless, QA that meets organizational demands requires that the tool covers all the needed aspects. Quality control as an inspection tool for the service industry covers psychological elements.
Recommendations
Organizations should strive to create a quality culture, which is an organizational culture that targets permanent quality enhancement. Quality culture has two main elements that include psychological or cultural elements and structural or managerial elements. In this sense, quality culture exists within two particular levels that tools and procedures represent on the one hand, while organizational-psychological aspects occur on the other. The difficulty of capturing the organizational-psychological aspects necessitates the development of quality control tools. The Quality Culture Inventory (QCI) allows learning institutions to empirically assess their present quality culture to develop mitigating measures.
Practical Applicability
Quality management is a central problem in the governance of learning institutions. Therefore, adherence to quality assurance strategies specific to an organization draws increased attention. Educational institutions should consider expanding traditional quality assurance approaches by emphasizing organizational aspects of psychology, for instance, commitment, shared attitudes, and common goals, to create a quality culture. Generally, a quality culture expands the traditional quality assurance approaches by including organizational psychology, thus adding a perspective to the structural aspect of management in a service delivery entity.
Conclusion
Most organizations experience difficulty when they undertake quality control because of the challenges in generating an appropriate tool that is responsive to quality culture, which stresses testing problems during quality control. The creation of an appropriate measurement instrument for assessing the quality of a service has a distinct aspect compared to that of a product. Learning institutions can create mitigation measures by conducting an empirical assessment of their current quality culture using the Quality Culture Inventory (QCI).
Future Research
Education institutions are making headway in online learning due to the changing global trends that increased digitization marks. Consequently, it endeavors to optimize and guarantee quality within online education to ensure learning institutions maintain competitiveness. As such, Shari (2020) suggests that research should investigate the effectiveness of current QA and QC models that meet the institutional demands of educational entities that inevitably move some of their activities to the digital environment.
References
Shraim, K. (2020). Quality standards in online education: the ISO/IEC 40180 framework. International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning (iJET), 15(19), 22-36. Web.
Trifiro, F. (2018). Inter-agency cooperation in the quality assurance of transnational education: challenges and opportunities. Quality in Higher Education, 24(2), 136-153. Web.
