If you’re in the quality assurance business like us, validation is a term you hear every day. "Validation" falls under the umbrella of terms businesses use to discuss the quality of their product, facility, or service. (Similar terms: IQ/ OQ/PQ, SOP’s, Storage, Deviation, Key Operating Procedure, and many more.)
For those not well-versed in the world of quality assurance, hearing ”validation” can send you running to hide under your desk. It’s a word that can scare you into a frightful Google search, an emergency call to someone in your quality department, or worse, it can scare you into ignoring it.
Why is that? We think it has to do with the widespread use of the word, without a concrete understanding. When a term like validation is used so frequently in the medical, pharmaceutical, and food industries, it can lose its foundation, and become a term that could mean anything!
And that’s scary to us. We’re in the validation industry. We build data loggers and temperature recorders used to validate HVAC systems, refrigerators, and even greenhouses. Having such an essential process like validation leaving our customers confused and disenchanted is bad for their product quality.
So we’d like to help. Here’s how we define validation:
"Documented testing done under controlled conditions and circumstances, to demonstrate the process, methodology, and specific systems used which will produce consistent results that meet acceptance criteria determined before the testing begins."
That’s a lot of quality assurance jargon! We promise it’s really important jargon. If that definition leaves you confused, you can head over to our blog, Blog.DicksonData.Com, for a detailed breakdown of each term mentioned in the above definition. Just search "Validation."
