Quality Control for Dummies

Quality assurance focuses on the ability of a process to produce or deliver a quality product or service. This method differs from quality control in that it looks at the entire process, not just the final product. Quality control is designed to detect problems with a product or service (see the next section); quality assurance attempts to head off problems at the pass by tweaking a production process until it can produce a quality product.

Almost every industry has an association or trade group that sets quality standards against which companies can measure the quality of their products or services.