When a business is service orientated, it is less likely to use strategic planning and is more likely to implement a policy of quality assurance. Quality assurance can be defined as the activity of providing evidence needed to establish confidence among all concerned. Typically, this establishment of confidence refers to ensuring consumers that quality related activities are being performed effectively with the goal of ensuring the quality of the product, good or service. Any and all planned or standardized actions needed to provide this confidence are part of a quality assurance program. The purpose of quality assurance is to that specific effective procedures are in place in order to make an advanced assurance that expected levels of quality can be assured.

Quality assurance occurs at all phases of a product or service development, including the design, development, production, installation, servicing, documentation and use. It also pertains to ensuring the quality of raw materials, assemblies, product components, production services, management and the inspection process....

As defined by the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission in Regulation 10 CFR Part 50, Appendix B, quality assurance "comprises all those planned and systematic actions necessary to provide adequate confidence that the structure, system, or component will perform satisfactorily in service." Thus, quality assurance necessarily encompasses quality control, or the subsection of quality assurance actions specifically related to the physical characteristics of a material, structure, component or system that provides a means of controlling the quality of the material, structure, component or system as required.
For this reason, although in general strategic business planning tends to benefit costs-leaders more than differentiators, this is not necessarily true when strategic planning is defined in a way that includes quality assurance. Quality assurance is a unique strategic business planning tool that is of a benefit to both cost-leaders and, more importantly, to differentiators. Thus, it can be concluded that specifically focused strategic planning can be of a benefit to both…