EVS Metal is excited to share our featured article in this month’s The Fabricator magazine.
The July 2018 edition allowed us an opportunity to give readers an inside look at our Quality Assurance and Quality Control teams, detailing the different responsibilities and tasks required by each department. The article also showcases the ways in which QA & QC work together to form our quality “dream team.”
If you Google “QA vs. QC,” it returns approximately 47.9 million results. While that’s only slightly more than half the number of search results as “Taylor Swift” produces, it illustrates how much confusion exists around the differences between quality assurance (QA)and quality control (QC).
While not every company defines QA and QC in the exact same way and the departments and areas might overlap in some manufacturing facilities, QA and QC do share some commonalities in the way they are treated in metal fabrication environments.
At EVS Metal, Riverdale, N.J., the role of QA is more about quality planning and ensuring potential quality issues are prevented, rather than just correcting problems that have already occurred. Of course, when quality issues do arise, quality personnel implement corrective action as well.
QA specialists also review customer returns and handle internal rejections, all with an eye toward continuous improvement and achieving the goals set up in the quality management system (QMS). The quality assurance team also works with vendors on quality-related issues, so they are able to make improvements.
On the other hand, the role of QC is skewed more toward the back end of the fabrication process, including in-process inspections, final inspections, receiving inspections, calibration, and first-article inspections.
In other words, QA is more about prevention, while QC focuses more on post-fabrication inspection and remediation when necessary. Both are important and are concerned with quality, but they have sharply different focuses and immediate objectives.
Click the image below to read the feature in its entirety:
Many thanks to Dan Davis, Editor-in-Chief of The Fabricator, and to Dipak Gandhi, Manager of Corporate QA, for their support and assistance in making this article a possibility.
