I have heard from different people that working in and with quality control can be tedious and difficult. Quality assurance and quality control work to make sure the products follow procedure and prevent from future disasters in the company. As annoying as it may seem, quality assurance and quality control are very important in the success of products. Quality makes sure that products follow protocol. Yeah they cause delays in the release of products because sometimes they might not follow the regulations and documentations necessary, but it helps from shutting down a company completely. Not only is it beneficial to companies from losing money, but it is also helpful for customers. If products were being released before going through quality control, it puts people’s lives at risk, especially when it comes to medical devices. If a damaged product is used without knowing until after it is released, it may be too late. It is always better for a company to ensure that quality assurance and quality control are in place.

The only way one should see this as a burden is if they have no idea of the consequences. Yes, QA/QC might cause you to rework, may cause delays, re-designs, failure analysis, retesting, downtime and lack of flexibility but imagine losing everything due to a simple error that could have been prevented during QC/QA. What if this error was due to an out of spec material that one acquired from a different company to complete a product?
Also, having QC/QA department does not mean your company won’t run into issues.
http://www.investopedia.com/slide-show/car-recalls/
Some of the biggest car recalls and these were not due to the companies not having QC/QA department
1. Chrysler recalled 13,000 Dodge chargers due to anti-lock brakes
2. Toyota out of control gas pedal 2009 & 2010
3. Ford failure to park recall 1980.
A company should invest in a quality team that will reduce the amount of incidences that occur within a company. The company should also invest in quality equipment’s/software. In 1990 a single line of buggy code causes 75 million AT&T missed phone calls and 200,000 lost airline reservations over a period of 9 hours. In 2005 Airbus A380 had a software oversight that led to wiring on each half of the plane being completely incompatible with the other half (estimated cost to fix issue $ 6 billion). The provided examples prove that QC/QA is a necessary requirement but also quality of personal should be taken into consideration when building a team.
http://www.developer.com/mgmt/slideshows/quality-assurance-failures-and-solutions.html

I agree with @srg36 about the nuances when it comes to quality control. Quality assurance process and quality control processes are crucial for any company/organization. In fact, it's so important that it should be paid attention carefully and fully invested so that it function as efficiently as possible. For example: hiring the best people knowning what they are doing, good commucation plan, streamline process...(I summarized these points in a different post). What I have seen is that people from quality control and quality assuarance and people from R&D are often not synchronized in a process, even about the same topic. Maybe, people from quality control and quality assuarance can be introduced the R&D a bit more and their work should be also constantly checked for reduncy and effectiveness.

The complain that Quality is a burden must come from people that do not understand the history of manufacturing mistakes that resulted in products that put people's lives at risk and intricacy processes of ensuring quality of the product. I worked for a company that was under consent decree and lack of quality assurance was one of the issues that the company had which led to this agreement with FDA. As part of settlement the company agreed pay $500 million on products produced during the three years prior to the signing of the consent decree and pay $175 million in future profits if it failed to adhere to the timelines established in the decree. Additionally, FDA withheld approval of the company's products, company shares fell 15 percent in a day, and investors filed a $165-million class action suit. As mentioned during the lecture, inadequate QA/QC can lead to devastating consequences and will put companies out of business. Fortunately, the company was a large corporation and had financial means to turnaround and get out of the consent decree.

I totally understand when people will complain about the quality, but hey I rather spend some money right now and higher some quality people instead I might have to lose my business. If I am running a business I would never every take a risk of not having a quality department even if I am best at it because the second and third opinion is always best, I might have miss something and certainly it is possible if I am manufacturing in bulk so it's always good to have quality people who might catch some problem in a product before it goes out the door and have chance of hurting someone. And I don't think quality is a burden I feel like they are the one who will train others as the FDA rules and regulations changes and most important they will run the projects by book which will be beneficial for the company on reputations in the market.

Considering 'quality is a burden' is one of the most common mistake of people. Most of the time people in R&D wants product to get qualify and out of the door ASAP. Which makes sense, since they have worked absolutely hard to get the finished product. But still this does not mean that it is perfect product and does not need any quality check. If QA/QC does their job properly, it will make things so much easier for the company during FDA visits too. and I am sure at that QA members will be the one to answer and won't feel so much as a burden.

I agree with most of the participants in terms of the importance of Quality Department in a medical device industry. I’ve worked as a Quality Engineer for 2 years in a medical device company and I’ve witnessed the importance of QA/QC. I agree that due to documentation and other quality requirements may delay the project. However, it helps the overall company in releasing a successful product in the market. Furthermore, there are external audits conducted by the notified body such as FDA, or ISO 13485 audit. And there needs to Quality Management System (QMS) established by the company to successful pass the audit. All in all, well established QMS and the QA/QC department prevents the company get shutdown. Thus, it’s better to pay off 60k (+) to a quality engineer then to deal with a lawsuit.

As far as I am concerned, cost the quality is necessary for a company. These years, I have heard so many examples of the recall of products, especially in the vehicle industry. The company recalled thousands of cars which are probably damaged. Recalling has the worst impact on the company. It not only cost so much money to deal with the product but also influences the market value. If they cost more on quality before, they maybe avoid these awful thinks. Same as the FDA Regulated Industries. Even, much more serious. If there are some problems, awful things will come out series. So the cost of quality is necessary all the time.

The cost of the quality is very much important for a company. Quality department ensures that the product is safe before marketing. Product is tested for its safety and standard regulations set up are followed. This sets up the confidence in the customers about the product's safety and reliability. This brings the company profit by putting the company's product in demand in market. FDA approved, safety regulations follwed and tested products will be in front that other products which dont abide these regulations. Hence making an initial investent in quality department is worth enough to have a safety, reliable proct in market at the end.

In general, the quality is one of the most important part of the company and that is the main reason why jobs for quality engineers are in demand. The best example that related to quality in general is the Ford Pinto case, in which the company decided to not include fuel system modification because it cost extra $11 per car, ultimately saving $12.5 million. This ultimately led to cost them more than $50 million because of deaths and other legal issues. If the quality engineer had done their job perhaps they could have saved more money and more lives.

One common bias found in the business world is "Discounting the Future." This bias prevents people from seeing the value in future investments and causes them to chase after things that save money and provide immediate benefit, even at a future cost. We see this all the time. For example, companies often choose to focus on objectives that will increase quarterly results and please investors, even at the cost of better future business prospects. People do this all the time in their lives (I'm sure we have all procrastinated at some point).

This bias is what prevents companies from addressing quality control early, which may result in disaster for them later. A well-developed business plan will address quality control costs and account for them, because they are an investment into the future of the company. A major lawsuit or recall, which may have been prevented with good QC practice, can sink a company. On the other end, it is unlikely that a company will fail due to the costs of investing in QC engineers and a QC protocol.

Quality control is similar to an insurance policy for a company's product. It is expensive, burdensome and, for younger companies, not obviously necessary. However, as the company grows, the need for quality control becomes increasingly important. Public trust, safety and, of course, the risk of a lawsuit, are all considerations that need to be taken into account early on when deciding on how much to invest in quality control. The approach to quality need not be totally standardized though. By spending more time deciding on which practices are absolutely necessary to ensure product safety and customer approval, costs can be reduced and the process can be less burdensome. It is definitely an investment worth making, but it need not be as burdensome as one might expect if it is properly integrated.

QA/QC are a kind of complicated process where over concentration may leads to irritation and ignorance leads to failure of the product/company/organization itself. Different fields has different things to take care. Lets take gas wells for instance.
The intricacies of critical well design and the delivery of ultra-high rate gas wells are each filled with complexities. A well’s complexity is directly related to the environment in which the well is being drilled and to a multitude of factors that can affect performance, safety, and the lifecycle and integrity of a company’s oil and gas assets. A well-thought-out Quality Management System (QMS) developed by an experienced team of engineers, quality experts, and inspectors can save an organization time and money and mitigate risk. This is precisely why a highly skilled technical team whose experience is rooted in some of the most complex and critical wells in the world is a team that is the most qualified for the job.
This is for a gas well. Whatever organization may be, this is gonna happen. So QA and QC are most important things in life.

Reference:
http://www.healyenergy.com/qaqc-services

The problem many see with quality control is the amount of effort put into it. There are certain aspects of quality control that require tremendous amount of time and input. Companies tend to neglect the quality control part because they want to have mass production without any delays. But again, it is important to realize that it is better to prevent disasters than react to disasters. Ensuring product safety should be priority number one of companies. Companies tend to give up long term investment for short term gains. This can develop to be a huge issue and at time is one of the main reasons companies are doomed. The cost versus benefit needs to be looked at and understood when looking at this situation.

Quality can definitely burdensome for medical and pharmaceutical companies and is a key driving factor in the high cost of delivering good products to the consumers. For a portion of my role as a Process Engineer we have teams dedicate to quality assurance and regulatory compliance when any changes are made to products. My role deals with originating and monitoring engineering change controls and this has a heavy influence from the quality side, which is to ensure that any change does not impact the output of the product from the manufacturing line. This can be burdensome for the company as it pulls away resources from other tasks, however it is a necessary burden since the downside of not having these programs in place would mean the risk of delivering unfit product to the consumer and costing the company and the patients in the long run.