Quality Assurance vs. Quality Control: What a Contract Manufacturer Offers

A business lives or dies based on its reputation, which is why the most successful brands focus heavily on maintaining quality in their products and processes. When it comes to your supply chain, your product offerings, and your shipping practices, you need to maximize quality across the board – so you should consider working with a contract manufacturer to improve quality control ASAP.

In this article, we’ll examine the differences between quality assurance and quality control, as well as explore how contract manufacturing organizations can provide your business with quality control benefits in more ways than one.

What is Quality Assurance?

Quality assurance, or “QA,” refers to all of the procedures, activities, and policies meant to maintain quality in an organization’s products.

For example, a small business creates medicinal products or formulas, like eye drops. Because customers will apply those drops to their eyes, they must be formulated properly, carefully packaged, and regularly tested with the utmost care and attention.

To ensure that each bottle of drops meets federal safety standards, the small business implements quality assurance policies and standards for all personnel to follow. By focusing on quality assurance, it builds up a reputation for being an excellent provider of its products and gains the trust of its target customers.

What is Quality Control?

Quality control, or “QC,” is an aspect of quality assurance. Specifically, it’s any monitoring, testing, or similar actions taken during product development and manufacturing to ensure overall quality.

Let’s return to the example of an eye drop brand that needs to produce both eye drop formula and eye drop packaging, plus ship those drops to customers. To guarantee a high level of quality in each product, the business implements quality control procedures such as:

• Testing the drops regularly (for instance, by taking random samples of the product during manufacturing)
• Performing laboratory work to improve the product as new scientific advancements are made/discovered
• Working with third parties, such as contract manufacturers, to make certain that packaging and shipping practices adhere to company standards (e.g., using as little plastic as possible in packaging to achieve green or recycling goals)

If the business notices anything wrong with the eye drops in a particular batch, for instance, that company might decide to get rid of that batch and start over or make modifications to the formula to prevent the same issue from appearing again.

Comparing Quality Control vs. Quality Assurance

There are a few key differences between quality control and quality assurance.

Quality assurance is comprehensive and includes all the efforts, policies, and other practices or guidelines that an organization uses to ensure that all products meet a certain standard of quality. Because of this, quality assurance is practiced throughout the entire manufacturing and product development process, including during shipping, receiving customer responses or comments, etc.

In contrast, quality control is only one part of the entire quality assurance effort. It’s highly important, but it must be accompanied by strict quality assurance guidelines and other systematic activities within a business.

You can also compare QA and QC by realizing that quality assurance is proactive and quality control is reactive. Both are vital, however.

Do Contract Manufacturers Offer QA or QC?

Contract manufacturers are organizations that companies can partner with to outsource various elements of their manufacturing and shipping processes.

For instance, pharmaceutical or medicinal product companies might work with contract manufacturers to:

• Ship products to customers in a timely manner
• Get access to high-quality medical disposables and packaging
• Leverage a contract manufacturer’s production plant or other equipment to make products in large quantities (especially if the company in question doesn’t have the necessary manufacturing capabilities itself)
• And more

Certain contract manufacturers, like Multi-Pack Solutions, offer a robust range of services, ranging from lab services  to medicinal product packaging. Our vertically integrated, turnkey solutions are perfect for companies of any size, and we’ve served our clients successfully for over 30 years.

Contract manufacturers can perform quality control actions including but not limited to:

• Finding or communicating with suppliers when needed
• Making site visits and audits to assess manufacturing capabilities and ensure product quality during production
• Performing risk assessments with suppliers or production processes
• Monitoring production, packaging, and shipping practices to note potential areas for improvement and correct errors as they arise

Furthermore, contract manufacturers can support quality assurance efforts made by any partnered company. As an example, if you work with Multi-Pack Solutions, we’ll help you develop and maintain quality assurance standards for any of the products we manufacture or ship on your behalf.

The Quality Control Benefits of Contract Manufacturing

Taking advantage of contract manufacturing enables your brand to benefit from several major advantages.

For starters, if you have a small business and don’t have a lot of experience in the area of quality control or quality assurance for a new product, a contract manufacturer might have the experience you require to maintain product quality and safety. Your business’s reputation can improve by following the advice of your contract manufacturer.

Furthermore, experienced contract manufacturers have the trained staff needed to perform audits or inspect products at any stage of the manufacturing process. For example, you may not know the possible issues to look for in a particular medicinal solution, like pain relief pads or creams – but the contract manufacturer creating and shipping the products might. You can, therefore, lean on the contract manufacturer to handle audits and produce quality reports for your perusal over time.

In aggregate, contract manufacturing can help businesses just like yours develop, achieve, and improve quality control and quality assurance standards.

Conclusion

In any industry, quality control is crucial. With the help of a contract manufacturer like Multi-Pack Solutions, you can maintain high quality control standards right from the start.

Multi-Pack Solutions has over three decades of experience, over 400 employees, and total vertical integration for a variety of manufacturing and shipping needs. Whether you need assistance with lab work and developing new products, packaging and shipping products to their destinations, or manufacturing certain solutions in bulk, we can help. Get in touch today to learn more.

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