For National Quality Month, Newport News Shipbuilding’s Quality Team is sharing the elements of quality management. This week’s topic is quality assurance.

Once a company has established its core business practices and goals, it can begin creating a system to ensure that products and services meet the established standards set by the company. Quality assurance provides the overall guidelines that are used everywhere and refers to any systematic process for ensuring that a product meets specified requirements. For example, military standards (MIL STD) and procedures (e.g. Q-1051, Q-1046, etc.) ensure processes are in place to maintain overall quality of products made by the company by adhering to reliability, performance and customer expectations.

In summary, a well-designed quality assurance system will work to minimize mistakes or defects during the manufacturing process. This helps ensure that the end product meets the requirements. The goal of quality assurance is to set the standards that ensure an end product meets customer expectations.