I think Quality department cannot be treated as a stand-alone entity in the company ensuring quality at every stage of product development. As the quality department ensures quality in every other department and the whole process of product development, each department should be trained about quality procedures of all other departments also. This helps in highlighting the significance of how quality control in one department is interdependent on maintaining quality in other departments.

In my previous experience in the industry, I can illustrate the above point with an example. In the medical imaging department, every scan received on a particular day has a turn-around time of 24 hours to 3 days to completely process the scan along with radiology results depending on the study protocol. Pre-quality and quality control teams ensure that all the scans are compliant with the imaging protocol for the study. A misstep in the pre-QC or QC stage of processing the scans, can lead to delayed radiology results and therefore missing the turn-around deadline which is again a quality issue. In order for the radiology department to accurately analyses the images, it is important for the imaging QC team to first take the step to ensuring quality.