What is quality management
Quality management goes beyond quality control and quality assurance. It includes all aspects that affect the quality of the organization, products, processes or services you provide. Consider, for example, ensuring the right working environment for your employees, improving the quality of your organization, promoting a culture of continuous improvement, obtaining quality certifications such as an ISO 9001 certificate or complying with laws and regulations. So quality management is not just a matter of the quality department, but of the entire organization.
Why is quality management so important to you?
A good quality management system is the foundation for delivering consistent, reliable, high-quality products and services and it reveals where your problems are if there is low efficiency within your organization. It gives you a framework for measuring and improving performance and helps you identify areas for improvement. It also ensures your customer satisfaction and allows your organization to operate more efficiently and effectively. In short, by investing in quality management, you ensure sustainable long-term success.
Known benefits of quality management include:
- Reducing complaints about quality
- Increase efficiency
- Process-based working
- Continuous improvements
- Obtaining quality certifications
- Fact-based decision making
How do you begin quality management within your organization?
Step 1: Conduct a baseline measurement
It is important to know where to start, this starts with conducting a baseline measurement, also known as a baseline measurement. This involves collecting and analyzing company data and conducting interviews and observations to understand the current state of affairs.
Think of business data as, for example: quality reports, customer satisfaction measurements, audits, process descriptions or policy documents.
It's like laying a foundation before building a house. Your baseline measurement ensures that your organization is structured and focused, and prevents you from wasting time and resources.
Step 2: Set concrete quality goals
Where do you start? Setting quality goals can be a challenging task, but it can also help immensely in improving your organization's performance.
The most important thing when setting quality goals is to make sure they are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. You want to make sure your goals are clear and concrete so you can measure whether you have achieved them and they are relevant to improving your organization's performance.
A good starting point in setting quality goals is to determine the key processes or areas you want to focus on. This can range from manufacturing processes to customer service or safety procedures.
Step 3: Use proven methods and tools
It is important to know what proven methods & resources are available and how to apply them effectively to improve quality in the organization.
PDCA (plan-do-check-act) Lean, Six Sigma and the 5S Method are all methods to improve your processes and increase quality in the organization.
"Accurate planning with PDCA, efficient working with Lean, targeted improvement with Six Sigma and structured organization with the 5S method - each tool has its own strength, but together they form a powerful toolbox for continuous improvement."
In addition, you can use standardized procedures, checklists and quality manuals. This can help improve collaboration between teams, for example. By establishing clear processes and procedures, employee expectations are better defined, reducing the likelihood of errors and miscommunication. This can lead to higher customer satisfaction, improved productivity and efficiency, and fewer deviations during internal and external audits.
Step 4: Increase readiness in the organization
Before implementing a management system in the organization, a crucial part is getting willingness within the organization. It involves convincing your colleagues to go along with the changes that the system will bring. This is because it is not enough to simply say that changes must be made.
For example, you can inspire and motivate people to actively participate in the process. By working on it together, your colleagues will feel more involved. This not only increases their understanding, but also gives them additional motivation to make the system work.
You also want your employees to have the right skills; you can achieve this, for example, by holding regular training sessions and workshops to educate your colleagues on quality control and process improvements.
Step 5: Keep improving continuously
With quality control, you measure and assess the performance of your products or services against set quality standards. This allows you to identify any discrepancies and take corrective action to prevent them from occurring in the future. Quality control includes various techniques and methods, such as inspections, audits and testing, that help identify problems and take action to resolve them.
How do you achieve success with a robust quality management system?
Quality management is more than just making sure everything runs smoothly. It is also about constantly looking for ways to do things better, faster and more efficiently and is essential to delivering quality and minimizing risk. Why keep records manually when it can be done automatically? Or why would you want to manage all your tasks, registrations and measures in different places when you can do it in your CAPA dashboard? Why would you need to gather information from different departments, business units or branches when your employees just need an overview of data in one system? This way you not only stay compliant with standards, but you also ensure that your quality management is up to date and fits the needs of your organization, allowing you to be successful.
