Unraveling QA, QC, Quality Assistance, and Quality 4.0

Quality control, quality assurance, quality assistance, and Quality 4.0. We unravel these quality concepts and their impact on design.

Listen in to be guided through the historical context and evolution of these terms, offering insights into how they shape design decisions and team communications. You'll learn the roles of quality assurance and quality control, discover the origins and meaning of "quality assistance", and grasp the implications of Quality 4.0.

We’ll dig into official definitions and explore how these quality methodologies have transformed over time. Through practical examples, we’ll show you how to integrate these quality methods into your design processes, fostering collaboration within cross-functional teams.

Tune in to enhance your understanding of quality thinking and quality during design.

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Transcript

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Dianna Deeney 0:00

I'm sure you've heard it before Quality is everyone's responsibility . You've also heard the terms quality assurance and quality control . Have you heard of quality assistance or quality 4.0 ? What's the difference between all of these terms , especially with quality assurance and quality control , the two oldest terms in the list I just listed ? As a designer , how are you supposed to interact with these terms ? If quality is everyone's responsibility , then what are you supposed to do for quality assurance and quality control ? Are there different ways you're supporting each of these ideas in how you design , and how does quality assistance and quality 4.0 fit into the design picture ? Let's explore some official definitions , the changes in quality that led to the quality assistance and quality 4.0 terms and give some context of quality with respect to design .

Dianna Deeney 1:05

After this brief introduction , hello and welcome to Quality During Design , the place to use quality thinking to create products others love for less . I'm your host , diana Deeney . I'm a senior level quality professional and engineer with over 20 years of experience in manufacturing and design . I consult with businesses and coach individuals and how to apply quality during design to their processes . Listen in and then join us . Visit qualityduringdesigncom . Welcome back here at Quality During Design . We're using quality tools and methods during the design process to help us with design , design information , design decisions and communication with our cross-functional team .

Dianna Deeney 1:54

Just recently I came across a term quality assistance and when I dug into it a little bit , it's a term that was used in a paper that was published in 2006 . And I'll get a little more into that paper what it was . But it was related to the software industry and the idea of quality assistance , meaning that quality professionals test engineers are assisting the design process iteratively by helping to provide information process , iteratively by helping to provide information . The quality assistance term didn't really seem to stick because I couldn't really find it in many places outside of the software industry . A new quality term that you may have heard is quality 4.0 . What is that and how does that supposed to fit into design ? I shared some of my thoughts on this in an article a couple years ago . I wrote an article called the future of quality under the e-magazine CIRM risk insights . I'll put a link to it in the podcast blog . But it was all about how the future of the quality profession is changing with the changing times . Quality tools and practices and methods are evolutionary and they follow a parallel track with industry , how industry has evolved over time . So we started with just inspection for control quality , and then we got a little more proactive with it with quality assurance , which led to quality management systems , and then concepts like design for excellence . So , yes , things are changing , just like in the design world . Things are changing , and pretty quickly .

Dianna Deeney 3:41

There's also a history of quality assurance and quality control . These terms are older , they've been around for a longer time and , even though some of their intents may be more faint or changing over time as the quality profession progresses , they're still really popular terms to use and some companies use them to differentiate activities and some don't . How does all of this affect design ? Because it does . Design interacts and supports the ideas and the types of goals that are in quality assurance and quality control . So let's explore those terms . First , the two oldest terms .

Dianna Deeney 4:27

For some of the official definitions , I wanted to go to the ASQ , which is a professional society focused on quality . They're also a certification board and they hold conferences with a focus on quality . If you are a quality professional , you're likely also a member of the ASQ . Their definitions , for the terms that I looked up anyway , are related to a quality glossary that was published in 2002 . So these terms have not changed definition in quite a while . These terms have not changed definition in quite a while . But when I did look it up on the ASQ website and within that document the definition for quality assurance and quality control was not really nailed down . It was sort of a soft definition definition . It gives some ideas but it really kind of highlights that these terms are sometimes used interchangeably and that different places and different companies have different interpretations of these terms . So just something to be aware about .

Dianna Deeney 5:37

I'm going to highlight some general differences between quality assurance and quality control . However , your company may use them interchangeably . You may have different departments for quality assurance and quality control . It may be lumped into one department . So wherever you're working you may just want to look into how your company uses these terms .

Dianna Deeney 6:05

In general , quality assurance is about planned and systematic activities to provide confidence that what we're doing is going to fulfill requirements of quality . So that's quality assurance . Quality control is more operational techniques and activities used to fill requirements for quality . So those are still pretty close in definition . So let's look at a different source , also from the ASQ , but from the Certified Quality Engineer Handbook . The definition of quality assurance in that handbook is pretty much the same as systematic actions necessary to provide confidence that a product or service satisfies certain needs and quality control . I like the definition in this handbook a little bit better the operational techniques and activities that sustain a quality of product or service . I was able to verify that these definitions were in use at least since 2008, . And they've been consistent since then . So I think , just from this and from my experience and from talking with other people , we can generally say that quality assurance is associated with planned , systematic activities . That's providing confidence that we're doing what we said that we were going to do . How that looks .

Dianna Deeney 7:41

As a designer , as a product designer , you're working with others within a quality management system or a product development process . As part of working this way , you are required or you're doing design reviews with your cross-functional team . You're doing verification testing against requirements . You're doing validation testing against the use needs . You may even be doing some use testing or field validation . All of these activities are part of quality assurance . They're planned , they're systematic . You're ensuring that it's covering everything that you're designing for .

Dianna Deeney 8:26

In this way , in working in a quality management system , meeting the requirements of that as you're designing , as you're doing your design process and then also following your design control process , where you are interacting with other members of your team to verify quality , ensure things are staying on track , and all the other activities that you're doing to verify and validate your ideas and your product design . That's all associated with quality assurance . When you do all of these activities , and you do them well , you're designing with quality assurance . When you do all of these activities and you do them well , you're designing with quality assurance , with quality control . We want to do activities and use techniques that are going to sustain the level of quality of our product or service .

Dianna Deeney 9:22

As a designer , you're working with other people to define what needs to be controlled during production . If you're producing a part , a tangible part , if you're designing a service , you're determining what measures are going to indicate a success or a problem during your services . For example , when you are setting your design outputs so your drawings , your specifications , all the engineering , communication , things that are telling other people how to create your product or how to perform the service those are the outputs of your design process . When you're creating those , you're also identifying what is important . What is it about this product that is important ? What measurement is important that manufacturing and operations need to monitor , because if they monitor that , that's going to assure the quality of the other things that this component is going to be used and assembled to for a quality product in the end . So with quality assurance and quality control , even if that isn't your role in the product development process , if you're the designer , you have a lot of input and feedback into the quality assurance and quality control , which is how it wraps into quality , is everyone's responsibility . So that's how the two oldest terms relate to product design .

Dianna Deeney 11:00

A newer term that I introduced at the beginning of the podcast here was quality assistance . I'll add the citation of the paper to the podcast blog , but its title is Software Testing and Industry Needs and it was published in IEEE Software Journal in 2006 . That paper talks about some of the challenges that testing engineers and test engineers have with software programs . Quality assistance was introduced as the evolution between quality control from the test engineers to something that's more integrated with the product development team development team . Instead of just testing software and saying if it passes or fails , the testers would work with the design team to test iteratively to be able to provide the design team more information . Under this quality assistance kind of thinking , the authors say that the testers are measured by their skill as investigators and communicators and by the tools they can create and use to support their investigations , not by their level of control over the product's code or design itself . So really , quality assistance was presented as a way for people that are not part of the design team to be able to have input and help the design team with better understanding the development as it's happening . We can kind of draw a parallel to how we think about working with reliability engineers . We don't necessarily want to design something and have it all finished and then hand it over to a reliability engineer to test . We want to work with our reliability engineers to be able to test , to gain information about what it is we're developing so that we can better understand it and make better informed decisions . So that is quality assistance . I really like the term but it didn't seem to stick because , like I said , I really couldn't find it referenced in a lot of other publications and it's not really a term that I've heard other people using either in conversation . The sentiment behind it isn't new and in fact my modus operandi as a quality engineer and reliability engineer takes the same kind of spin where it's integrated , it's collaborative , it's a partnership .

Dianna Deeney 13:31

A term that is used more frequently is quality 4.0 . I'm sure you've heard of industry 4.0 , also known as the fourth industrial revolution fourth industrial revolution , and just a bit ago I introduced quality as evolving right along with industry , and it continues to do so . So we have quality 4.0 , which is meant to recognize a shift in quality and response to industry 4.0 . Just as everyone is adapting to the new digital technologies , with respect to not only the products themselves , but how we design and how we do our development process , the people that are working in quality are also adapting . Quality 4.0 is more about quality being data-driven and applying modeling and simulation for quality management . It's integrating innovation with quality managing for innovation , and also has to do with information , quality itself , what we base our models and our databases on . Is that information and is that data of a high quality ? Is that information and is that data of a high quality ? We're using it to make decisions and we're using it to create new things . It should be of a high quality .

Dianna Deeney 15:01

These new definitions for quality , quality assistance , which is really the idea of partnering with quality people , and then also the development of Quality 4.0 . What does this mean ? As a product designer . What it really means is that the quality professionals in your life , in your work life , are being challenged beyond just quality assurance and quality control aspects of quality process , of how you design , quality practitioners are being challenged to keep up with you , to help you maintain quality through these changes and using these new technologies . And why wouldn't you want help with that ?

Dianna Deeney 15:46

I was introduced to a new product development team and the project manager was used to seeing quality people as people that just had a big red stop button . I don't know if you remember the office supply store that had the big button that you push in case of emergency . Well , in this case it was really quality professionals having a big red stop button to just put everything to a halt if they weren't doing things right . And really quality practitioners are trying to move away from that kind of a relationship with their designers . You want to find the quality professionals that want to help you make decisions , want to help you create tests or do tests on products so that you get more information for product design . They want to help you think through what's going to be needed for quality control when things are being produced , or wants to help you manage the quality assurance of whatever it is that you're developing .

Dianna Deeney 16:49

You want to look for a partner in your quality professionals when you're doing design , and that's really what the industry is starting to focus on . As I mentioned , the ASQ is a certified body and they have a certified quality engineer and they publish textbooks about the kind of information that you need to be able to understand and know if you're certified in those areas . In this handbook , in the preface to the first edition , they referenced studies that were performed by the ASQ in the late 1990s and they already started to notice a trend of quality tools being used by more people outside of the quality professions , so people like design engineers using quality tools to be able to better communicate with their cross-functional team , or people in business using quality tools to be able to assess risk . The editors of that first edition really called for quality professionals to be mentors for the proper use and application of quality tools and that the quality professionals really need to become masters of those tools so that they can be the most effective mentors that the rest of the team needs them to be . So , with this happening 30 years ago , it's not like this is new news to everybody , but it may be a different way of thinking about quality from a product design standpoint , from your standpoint .

Dianna Deeney 18:26

So what's today's insight to action with all of this ? When you're doing activities within your product development process , you're helping to assure the quality of your product . When you're identifying what is critical to safety , functionality , quality , you're helping determine quality control . And when you partner with others that are experts in quality practices , you're helping to do quality during design , ensuring that you have good information and that you're being data-driven toward quality . Those are some of the ways that you can adopt quality as your responsibility in product design . I invite you to visit the podcast blog for this episode . It's on the website . It has more information and additional links , and I will cite the sources that I referenced in today's episode . This has been a production of Dini Enterprises . Thanks for listening .