[Quality Management] QUALITY CONTROL (QC) AND QUALITY ASSURANCE (QA)
Quality Control is the mechanism intended to achieve management’s intended characteristics of the company’s products and services. However, guidelines and directives may not always become implemented as intended. Someone needs to certify that the mechanisms actually are in place and working, hence, Quality Assurance. Business, governmental and military organizations have long used auditors (reviewers) to certify the existence of assets and prescribed records and to verify that operations are conducted as intended. Today’s QC and QA programs are merely extensions of long-established management practices, but they have acquired new names and forms tailored to the food industry The roles of these two functions, responsible for ensuring product quality, and their reporting relations to senior management, vary with the size of the company. They often are two separate entities in medium- and large-size companies. Quality Control works at the plant level to...