Quality Management Systems

When we talk about Quality, the most common definition that comes to mind is "The best..."

However, when we are talking about Quality in the context of Quality Management, we are actually referring to how well your product/service meets it's defined requirements.

Quality Management, in it's most basic form, is the concept of planning and controlling your organization's activities in order to preserve the Quality of your product/service (or the ability to meet it's requirements).

In order to do this, we need to consider what requirements we need to achieve and develop standardized ways of doing things in order to meet them.

As an example, think about getting to work on-time. If you are consistently misplacing your car keys, you will not meet your requirement and often arrive late. In order to manage this requirement, you can implement a system where you always place your car keys in the same location, every time. Now you can be assured that you will meet your requirement of being able to get to work on-time because you have a system in place to control your quality (or meeting your requirement).

Quality Management System standards have been in place for decades. The fundamental standard for Quality Management is ISO 9001. This has been adapted and modified to meet the needs of specific industries such as aerospace (AS 9100), automotive (IATF 16949), medical (ISO 13485), and many others. 

Becoming certified to a Quality Management System Standard assures your customers that you have the proper controls in place for their products and, in many industries, allows you to  sell your products directly to the prime customers you want to have.

A misconception about Quality Management Systems is that it is a separate, or standalone system that must be maintained on top of your daily business management. 

Many clients fear the extra work load that Quality Management Systems will impose on them and their day-to-day operations. In reality, these QMS standards have been designed to be implemented within your business management tasks.

The core requirements of these standards are set up to improve your business and eliminate waste such as miscommunications and bad products to your customers.

They look at basic business practices and enhance them with requirements that help reduce errors, like: 

• how you take an order
• how you produce a product
• how you evaluate the performance of your company 

The most important aspect of implementing a Quality Management System is to determine the core flow of information and identify where you can put "checks" in place to control the flow without unnecessarily impeding it.

Once the Quality System has been planned and implemented within an organization, the hard part is keeping it running. This means ensuring that everyone is consistently working towards the same goal and everyone knows what to expect, and how to expect it.

If a system is integrated properly into a business, the controls and requirements that are needed become part of the daily activities of your employees. Everyone knows what they are doing, how they are doing it, and how to document and continue the flow onto the next step. The disconnect with this "ideal situation" is when a Quality System isn't designed to work with the actual practices of a company. Employees will essentially be performing double the work (that of the Quality System and that of the business). Inevitably, one or both of these areas will suffer: Important business functions will not be consistent, and/or the Quality System will begin to dissolve.

It is essential that an organization understands how their Quality System is expected to operate in order to properly maintain it. Almost every QMS Standard contains requirements such as auditing your system and conducting performance reviews; these are tools we use to maintain our Quality System. By understanding the expectations of the QMS, we can periodically audit it's functionality and review it's results to make sure everything is performing successfully.