What is a quality management system?
A quality management system, hereafter KMS, is a management tool to ensure and improve the quality of business operations. The system makes visible the critical processes in the organization, whether customer requests are processed correctly and on time, and whether your customers are satisfied or even loyal. In other words, as a company, have you got everything right that you say "what you do" also rings true in practice: "do you do what you say? After all, every customer wants to receive the quality they paid for. This is of all times that we like to have quality delivered. Back in the Middle Ages, for example, quality was guaranteed through guilds. In a guild, knowledge and experience were exchanged. New guild members were trained in the trade. After this training, an apprentice could be recognized as a craftsman. This guild often had the sole right to practice that trade, which led to the assurance of quality work. Working in guilds has been a thing of the past for some time, but it can be seen as a precursor to a management system.
Where do quality management systems come from?
The first official ISO 9001 standard for quality management dates from March 15, 1987 and originated from the 1969 Allied Quality Assurance Publications (AQAP). These were drawn up from NATO and thus have their origins in the military industry.
NATO developed the quality standards for its suppliers. The main reason for this was to ensure that the right and high-quality materials were delivered to the front line at the right time. As a supplier, you had to meet this standard or you were not allowed to deliver.
Since 1987, the ISO 9001 standard has been regularly revised and republished. In the Netherlands, this standard is officially called NEN-EN-ISO 9001:2015. This standard succeeded its 2008 predecessor. The new standard is based on High Level Structure (HLS), which is a capstone and applicable to all management systems. This structure applies to many other ISO standards and thus allows a quality management system to be easily integrated with another management system such as environment, occupational health and safety and/or information security.
What does a good quality management system give your organization?
In addition to companies and organizations using a quality management system to improve their own processes, there are a number of other advantages to working with a quality management system.
1. Reducing complaints about quality
No matter how well your company functions, from time to time when the product or service is delivered, it still comes to a complaint about the quality delivered.
This can relate to various aspects. For example, about delivery reliability, delivered service or products that do not meet agreed specifications. A quality management system helps identify the causes, set out improvement actions and secure the result. After all, you want to prevent the problem from happening again in the future.
2. Increase efficiency
Another motivation is that you want the company to operate as efficiently as possible.
A quality management system can be an important support here. After all, working with a system means looking at the entire production or delivery process. Looking at individual employee performance is a limitation of efficiency possibilities. Working with a system means that all performance together within the business process of your employees can lead to an even higher efficiency instead of looking at the individual performance of your employee.
3. Process-oriented work
Working with a quality management system means thinking in terms of processes. Working in processes often provides useful answers: do the processes fit well? Where are inefficiencies and risks in the processes and how can they be resolved? Who is actually the process owner?
4. Continuous improvements
During the implementation of a quality management system, a company usually also aims for a culture change. A change that leads to a culture that continuously seeks ways to improve the quality of products or services. This is because employees perceive that the company in which they work wants to continuously improve. If this is propagated by your company, a pleasant side effect is that employee satisfaction often increases as well.
5. Certification
More and more clients are demanding that their suppliers meet quality requirements such as the ISO 9001 standard. This has long since ceased to be limited to just NATO, which asked for this with its AQAP standard. With a properly implemented quality management system, it will not be a difficult exercise for most companies to certify to the ISO 9001 standard. A quality management system certification is often seen as the crowning achievement: a well-implemented system. With certification, a third party, the certifying body, has looked at and assessed whether your company is working according to the ISO standard.
Can a quality management system running on ISO2HANDLE capitalize on the benefits mentioned?
Developments have been rapid in recent years. While in the days of the guilds work was still done with parchment, at the end of the last century with paper, the present time is characterized by digitization. A digitized quality management system has all the advantages for working digitally. Want to know more about the advantages of working digitally? Then read our white paper. Regarding the five benefits mentioned, ISO2HANDLE can support the mentioned benefits as follows:
1. Reducing complaints about quality
Within the quality management system of ISO2HANDLE it is possible to set the causes for which you want to analyze the complaints at which department they arose and the costs of repair. This information provides information for steering and improvement measures as well as notifications to stay well informed whether measures are carried out. By creating your own graphs it is easy to see where the biggest improvement areas are in your organization.
2. Increase efficiency
A quality management system within ISO2HANDLE is set up as a system. All your employees can actively and quickly register quality records and retrieve agreements It is also quickly clear to everyone what the performance of the quality management system is.
3. Process-oriented work
Your company can always decide how its own processes are described.
Any form of description is supported by ISO2HANDLE. A special form of process description is the Turtlediagram. This diagram allows you to quickly, intelligently and coherently map the various disciplines: how the processes in your organization are set up and what the performance is, who is competent, what resources are used and how this performance is measured. Within ISO2HANDLE it is possible to arrange these diagrams in an easy way.
4. Continuous improvements
Because all improvement measures can be secured in the system, this can also be quickly clarified. The PDCA circle is clearly reflected in the registrations entered in the system. The search for documents to prove this is now a thing of the past.
5. Certification
If you set up your quality management system in ISO2HANDLE, a certifying body has the option of logging into your system. With this, you no longer have to search yourself for all the documentation and registration that the auditor of the certifying body asks for. These are already available in ISO2HANDLE and can be reviewed by the auditor. This means that external audits can take place faster with less burden on your organization during this audit.
Want to know more about the possibilities? Then go to our contact page and get in touch with us today.
