Quality in the Business

QHSE Support >(Site Map) Quality Guidance > 

Quality throughout the business

The business of Quality...

 

Effective quality management requires hard work, continuous hard work. It needs demonstrable commitment, a planned and systematic approach to delivering quality goods and services today and every day.  While also satisfying the requirements of your accreditation body and equally, if not more important, the ever-increasing expectations of excellence your customers will demand. It will require clear plans, structured in an organised manner, promoting continuous improvement and customer satisfaction. Any Quality Management System should lean easily to performance measurement and monitoring criteria. Valuable data may become buried by complex reporting and bureaucratic procedures. The system should also identify and remove variation while being conscious and reactive to business growth and market change. The management should control the Quality Management System and not the other way round, which is sadly the case for some organisations.

 

Ask yourself one simple question, is your QMS designed to promote improvement or merely to satisfy certification? (lip service)

 

For those embarking on the ISO 9001 road to QMS...

 

Successfully implementing ISO 9001:2015 to its sincerest intent often gives the following advantages:

 

•A more efficient, effective operation and use of resources

•Enhanced customer satisfaction and especially important customer retention and loyalty

•Mutually beneficial supplier relationships

•Enhanced reputation

•Enhanced marketing 

•Improve employee engagement

•Promote international trade

•Maintain and Increases profit

•Reduce waste and increase productivity

•Improve internal and external communications 

 

A more simplistic view of a quality management system could be explained as;

 

1.Quality System  = Vehicle

2.Quality Management = Driver

3.Quality Policy = The Road Map

 

A Quality Management System based solely on ISO 9001 should be considered the minimum requirement. The development of procedures, instructions, process maps, etc., will have, for the best part, a beneficial effect on the organisation's performance. 

 

Pre ISO 9001-2015 standards perhaps suffered from being excellent at telling you where you have performed poorly. However, less able to enforce strong leadership and commitment to improvement at all levels. This less than perfect situation often occurs where an organisation grows to a level where it feels compelled to employ a token quality manager, who has little influence over the top management. Often these token quality managers' roles are to maintain certification with the minimum of fuss to production. Time will tell if organisations remain able to abuse the true nature of the standard, purely because the CEO wishes an ISO 9001:2015 accreditation certification hanging on his wall with minimal cost and upheaval to the current running of the business.

Help file v2.276.407 : QHSE Support - Website On Safe Lines 

onsafelines.com QHSE Software 2024 : Webmaster: Brian G. Welch MSc(QHSE), NVQ4(OH&S), CMIOSH