QUALITY ASSURANCE

The design and build portions serve to develop the structure of a QMS, its processes, and plans for implementation. Senior management should oversee this portion to ensure the needs of the organization and the needs of its customers are a driving force behind the systems development.

Deployment is best served in a granular fashion by breaking each process down into subprocesses and educating staff on documentation, education, training tools, and metrics. Company intranets are increasingly being used to assist in the deployment of quality management systems.

Control and measurement are two areas of establishing a QMS that are largely accomplished through routine, systematic audits of the quality management system. The specifics vary greatly from organization to organization depending on size, potential risk, and environmental impact.

Review and improve detail how the results of an audit are handled. The goals are to determine the effectiveness and efficiency of each process toward its objectives, to communicate these findings to the employees, and to develop new best practices and processes based on the data collected during the audit.

Quality Assurance is different from testing. QA is more focused around processes and procedures, while testing is focused on the logistics of using a product in order to find defects. QA defines the standards around testing to ensure that a product meets defined business requirements. Testing involves the more tactical process of validating the function of a product and identifying issues.

There are several different food safety standards. Companies mostly follow them as a customer demand. It is possible to be certified for several standards at once, this implicates a more complex document system. 

The Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI), a coalition of action from The Consumer Goods Forum (CGF), brings 41 retailers and manufacturers from across the CGF membership and an extended food safety community to oversee food safety standards for businesses and help provide access to safe food for people everywhere. They recognize several important schemes such as:

FSSC 22000

BRC

IFS

Global G.A.P.

SQF

ASIAGAP

Primus GFS

It’s easy to confuse the term quality assurance with quality control (QC). Although the two concepts share similarities, there are important distinctions between them.

QA provides the overall guidelines used anywhere, and QC is a production-focused process – for things such as inspections. QA is any systematic process for making sure a product meets specified requirements, whereas QC addresses other issues, such as individual inspections or defects.

In both ways Mérieux NutriSciences offers the best in class consultants to manage your process’.