What the Differences Between Quailty Control and Quality Management?

Abstract

This study aims at evaluating the differences between quality control and quality management. Through reading several research paper and academic books, there is a path of developing the concept of total quality, starting from quality control, then go into quality assurance and eventually the concept of total quality management. Moreover, several tools are particularly discussed for each quality concept to pinpoint their unique characteristics, so that weaknesses behind will be more easily discovered. After the comprehensive analysis, total quality management seems to have considered the collaboration of the management philosophy with the quality system internally and externally.

Keywords: quality control, quality assurance, total quality managment, management philosophy

Introduction

Quality plays a key role in all industrial development. Traditionally, quality has been associated with the product that a customer receives. This is very laudable but placing a high-quality product or service in the marketplace does not, on its own, guarantee either sales or business succes. As a business student and studying at Management Sciences, I have studied Quality Management (QM) before. Therefore, in order to learn further those philosophies and methods that exclude from my course, I have decided to choose the this topic . Moreover, when I studied (QM) in last semester, I have noticed that there has been a surge of books on quality and new quality methodologies such as TQC, TQM, QFD and so on. This blizzard of ideas and methods is my indication of an increased interest in quality.

However, I found that one of the main difficulties evident in the field of quality management is the variety terms employed. Many are used both interchangeably and inconsistently. Therefore, in order to clarify this kind of confusion, this paper will mainly discuss the following generic terms: quality control (QC) and total quality management (TQM) followed by analysing their major differences.

Literature Review

Before we understand what are differences between QC and TQM, basically we should understand what means of quality. Quality as being “fitness for use” (Joseph Juran), or that of Philip Crosby who defines quality as “conformance to specification”. To further extend its meaning, quality can have two meanings basically: (1) the characteristics of a product or service that bear on its ability to satisfy stated or implied needs and (2) a product or service free of deficiencies.”

Quality Control (QC) is defined as the techniques or activities which sustain quality to specified requirements. In other words, it is used to secure products or services quality as laid out in a product specification. Moreover, QC is not a prevention-based system, its basic activity is inspection, including the determination of inspection points, the inspection method development, data collection and analysis and prevention of chronic problems.

Quality Assurance (QA) means to assure quality in a product so that a customer can buy it with confidence and use it for a long period of time with confidence and satisfaction. Here, the product must have true quality characteristics. That means it is insufficient to deliver to the customer product which is not flawed or defective. What does QA do will further shift the emphasis from detection to prevention of non-conformance.

Total quality management (TQM) is defined as the application of quality management principles to all aspects of business. In fact, the Japanese experience of total quality control (TQC) was rapidly “reimported” back to the US and received widespread adaptation. TQC in western countries is commonly referred to as Total Quality Management (TQM). Principally, TQC and TQM are referred to as the same quality improvement system. According to Feigenbaum, “TQC is an effective system for integrating the quality development, quality maintenance, and quality improvement efforts of the various groups in an organization so as to enable production and service at the most economic level which allows for full customer satisfaction.’ Also, Feigenbaum defines “total” as an “internal quality” of an organization. When explain its meaning regard of the organization itself, “totality” refers to participation by all the three levels of the management hierarchy, from the top management through the middle level to the bottom level. After committing the quality vertically and externally, the real spirit of “total” in total quality management can be achieved.

Main Body

Traditionally, every plant must carry out the inspection processes at the end of the production line to ensure that products are defect-free before it is launched in the marketplace, which is exactly what the department of quality control does. Besides, raw material testing is also included in the quality control system. Inspection is essential because defects and detectives always exist. When there are defects, the only action the manufacturers can take is that of implementing the correction plan such as making adjustments, reworking the products or consigning it to scrap.

Naturally, it is not cost-effective to perform 100% inspection of the supplier quality, instead the acceptable quality level (AQL) is developed to identify a certain percentage of defective products that accepted by both suppliers and manufacturing plants. Normally, consumers (the manufacturing plants) assume 10% risk of accepting defective raw materials while producers assume 5% risk of accepting their products being wrong for the first time.

Meanwhile, by keeping production output within the certain desired level of specification by detecting causes of variation and removing those causes, the simple statistical techniques will be used like the “Pareto Diagram” (Appendix 1). It is effective in the quality analysis as most of the quality problems are actually attributed to a very small number of causes, in the more practical term, that means 20% of the causes are responsible for 80% of the defects. Therefore, if the causes of these vital few problems are identified, the inspector actually can eliminate almost all the problems.

However, a very critical weakness in quality control is that it emphasises on the recovery of defective products rather than performing the defect prevention process. Moreover, what if problems occur in the designing or development process but not the end of production line, it is obvious that quality control cannot be solved it (Appendix 2).

In today’s modern society, it is insufficient to deliver to the customer products which are good enough or perfect. In