ABSTRACT
Although quality control (QC) and quality assurance (QA) sound very similar, their meanings are not. QC refers to operational techniques and tests required to maintain and improve the quality of a product or service. QA refers to activities that monitor and evaluate the performance of QC procedures employed in the manufacture or products and services. Laboratory Information Management Systems (LIMS) make significant contributions to QA/QC through automatic specification checking, with user warnings, graph (control charts and trend analysis) and report generation, full audit trail, automatic calculations, automated sample tracking, on-line standard operating procedures (SOPs), maintenance of standards, instrument calibration, tracking training records, and much more.
