Quality, in relation to products or services can essentially be defined as the degree of excellence in that product or service and how it meets a customer’s expectations. Every customer will have their own definition or perception of quality.
A QMS is the customer focused structure, processes, procedures, and resources needed by an organisation to implement, maintain and continually improve the management of quality throughout the entire organisation. QMS is a global standard that management can implement across any industry, location or business.
Implementing a QMS benefits every aspect of a company’s performance. Meeting the customer’s requirements helps to instil confidence in your organisation. This in turn increases your organisation’s competitive edge, leading to higher customer satisfaction. Ultimately, this leads to more customers, sales and repeat business. As a manager you can meet your organisation’s requirements, ensuring compliance with legal requirements, regulations and provision of products and services in the most cost and resource-efficient manner. Therefore, creating provision for expansion, growth, and profit.
These benefits offer additional advantages for company management, specifically: helping to communicate a readiness to produce consistent results; enabling a more efficient use of time and removing a need for micro-managing processes and personnel, reducing costs; ensuring that processes are accurately defined, documented and controlled; improving employee satisfaction and retention rates; and continually improving the organisation’s offerings.
For a product or service, quality is the customer’s perception or definition of excellence.
Organisations, whether large or small benefit greatly by recognising a customer’s perception or definition of quality and implementing a quality system to produce a quality product or service – first time and every time.
Small businesses are always trying to minimise their costs, so often site cost is a barrier to implementing a QMS. With competition so fierce nowadays, organisations need to be able to distinguish themselves. What better way than through great customer satisfaction!! Implementing a QMS into an organisation with a quality culture can easily reduce your cost in many ways. Here a just a few:
A quality management system makes documenting data and providing accurate records easy. All of which is essential to improving the quality of products and services.
These 12 steps are invaluable to implementing a Quality Management System. They also are applicable to any kind of business, whether small or large, or producing a product or service.
A certified QMS requires certain types of documents. As part of the certification process, you will be guided through the documentation requirements of an ISO 9001 certified Quality Management System.
These documents are invaluable to management by:
QMS documents are essentially structured in the following way:
Properly structured documents will make business operations much easier for both management and employees.
A QMS is the customer focused process implemented by an organisation to satisfy the standards demanded by customers to satisfy their expectations. Another quality system is Total Quality Management (TQM). TQM is a complete package focusing on management’s approach to quality control, quality assurance and quality improvement success through customer satisfaction.
There are also common goals in quality systems like TQM and QMS, for example running a failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA) to identify and analyse potential risks and problems according to severity and likelihood, then determining the root causes and implement appropriate corrective action to eliminate the risk or problem.
Implementing a quality management system will result in many long-term gains for your business, your customers and your employees. Here are just some of the benefits of effectively implementing a QMS:
In business, we all know that time is money. Any time you invest in implementing quality control processes and policies up front, will save time in the long run. Employees will learn and know what do, how to do it and when to do it. With a Quality Management System in place and the effective use of risk management and change management, the system will ensure that mistakes are few and far between. This will save you time and money, improve customer satisfaction and make your workplace a happier environment for your employees.
If you are considering integrating quality and structure into your business with a QMS implementation and certification we recommend you find a provider who sees Quality Management System certification as more than just a tick in a box. Look for a provider who will add the human touch and take the time to not only understand your business but to partner with and support you through the certification process and beyond for your organisation’s ongoing success in continuous quality improvement.
We know businesses are tired of the same old tick and flick approach, which is why we have built our reputation around Certification Differently – taking a fresh approach to certification.
We want the organisations we work with – both big and small – to see the benefits and success that ISO Certification can facilitate. We truly believe that effective management systems are a key enabler of that success and working with the right certification body can drive material improvements in system performance, resilience and reliability.