A detailed discussion about Quality Management System
June 18, 2019 2024-04-25 6:18A detailed discussion about Quality Management System
A detailed discussion about Quality Management System
Every business is looking forward to advanced methodologies to increase their profit share. Businesses desire an increase in revenues while satisfying customer requirements and sustaining a sharp edge over their competitors. Those who are still unaware of this are lacking, and there are fair chances of a sinking business boat! Emerging technologies have affected conventional QMS (Quality Management System). And that’s not it; technological adoption is a major player in quality control too. Successful implementation of a QMS is an art as much as it is a science. To improve the Quality Management Process of your business, keep reading!
Table of Content:
- Introduction
- What is Quality Management System?
- Characteristics of Quality Management System
- How does an effective QMS help business resolve cultural issues?
- What are the possible requirements for QMS?
- Stages involved in a QMS
- How QMS Can Improve Your Quality Management Process
- Final Words
QMS means the coupling of science and art to manage people while achieving the best approaches to attaining quality. In simpler terms, QMS is a phenomenon that ensures that a business organization, service, or product remains consistent with quality.
QMS is not just limited to qualitative services or products; it is also related to a maintained continuum of quality standards. Thus, we can say that Quality Management System is a set of tasks and activities that require achieving a level of excellence and brilliance.
QMS incorporates quality control, quality planning, and quality improvement.
What is Quality Management System?
A QMS can be defined as a standard system of processes or responsibilities that are used to attain quality objectives and policies. A Quality Management System assists organizations in coordinating their activities to sustain regulatory requirements and customer satisfaction. It also helps in the continuous enhancement of effectiveness.
ISO 9001:2015 is the most celebrated approach to QMS. It consists of a bunch of international standards that specify comprehensive needs for Quality Management Systems.
QMS offers various benefits, such as:
- Lesser Costs
- Improved Process Efficiency
- Low Wastage
- Helps in determining Training Opportunities
Characteristics of Quality Management System
Inculcates Leadership Qualities:
A properly designed Quality Management System helps businesses nourish their employees with leadership qualities. This is a result that helps unite them towards a common goal and better performance.
Customer-Centric:
Every company has a common goal, which is business growth and satisfied customers. This is only possible if every member of the organization is aware of the customer’s views and demands.
Multiple Process Approaches:
It is just similar to multiple ways of reaching a destination. If you have multiple approaches, your chances of achieving business success are higher. Also, you get the right insight into how to manage resources the right way.
Better Internal Communication:
Better communication is the key to immense business success. It also helps in attaining desired goals of the organization and boosts client satisfaction.
Fruitful for both the company and their suppliers:
The suppliers and companies are dependent on each other. There is a mutual relationship between both that justifies the business relationship. Therefore, QMS acts as an in-between link for beneficial growth.
Effective Decision Making Approach:
Decisions that are based on factual data are always efficient and effective.
Despite these, a QMS features many more characteristics that are needed by every business. In some cases, modifying QMS has proved its worth and satisfied its unity of purpose.
How does an effective QMS help business resolve cultural issues?
Quality Management System is one of the best practices that promotes growth and quality. In fact, accurately implementing QMS helps employees leverage their capabilities. QMS also helps to take employees away from institutional processes and out of their comfort zones.
The benefit of implementing QMS is that employees gain better knowledge about their hidden capabilities. They feel very motivated, and this is something every company dreams of.
For successful implementation, a QMS requires flexibility, robustness, and intuitiveness. It should be based on tight management, which means better outcomes.
Quality Management System is wiser for an organization to be ready to expect changes in the behavior of staff. It becomes imperative to recognize an employee’s attitude while implementing a QMS.
Another aspect of the Quality Management System is employee participation. A manager should listen to what the employees think about the QMS. This will make them feel involved and help in terminating any possible flaw.
Always keep in mind that QMS takes time to deliver fruitful outcomes. Every organization takes some time to properly adapt to the changes and start working according to them.
What are the possible requirements for QMS?
A QMS can have several requirements. Actually, the requirements vary from organization to organization. Every organization functions differently. Here are some common requirements for a QMS:
- The quality policies and objectives of an organization.
- A comprehensive, quality manual that incorporates justifications and scopes. This helps in keeping an eye on the QMS and determining if there is continuous improvement.
- Any document that requires ensuring proper planning, operations, and quality control.
- A document that proves compliance of a Quality Management System with the standards.
Significantly, the process of QMS contains four important phases.
Stages involved in a QMS
Quality Planning:
Planning is the most important part of every process, and a QMS is no exception. Quality planning helps in setting a specific objective to achieve a business goal. It also needs to be error-free and the objectives should be communicated properly among the employees.
Quality Assurance:
So you have planned what to do and started implementing it. What comes next? Quality assurance helps in monitoring whether the plan is on track or not. A quality assurance system contains various audits and processes that need to be evaluated for overall effectiveness.
Quality Control:
Right after quality assurance, quality control follows. Quality control helps in the factual measurement of the work that is either done or in progress.
Documentation:
A quality management system completely relies on the right documentation. Documentation means carrying out processes one after the other in the right way. Without documentation, there are chances that a QMS will fail.
How QMS Can Improve Your Quality Management Process
Research by ASQ (American Society for Quality) claimed that poor-quality services or products eat up more than 10% of the organization’s revenue. Let’s simplify this!
A poor-quality product needs timely recalls for refinement and scrapping defects. This not only damages brand reputation but also increases costs. With the emergence of ISO 9001, more and more companies are taking interest and are searching for approaches to reduce costs.
Reducing quality expenses requires the capability to look beneath the surface to discover and determine the underlying complexities.
A quality management system is a helping hand that assists organizations in developing quality products while reducing the cost of quality achievement.
Fewer chances of human errors:
Humans tend to make errors! A single error is equal to a gigantic loss of business as well as customer satisfaction.
Most of the companies are not automated and are relying on manual data entry and similar operations. Even when the employees are fully awakened and very careful, there are chances that they will commit some mistake.
You might be astonished to know that some minor errors surpass the double checks and can ruin your business game. For example, your employees are collecting information on their diaries and they have to enter the information into the PCs.
There are two risky cases. The first is that the employee can make an error while entering information in his diary. And second, when the employee feeds the information into the PC,. More errors result in more rectification time and an enormous bill.
What if you get a system that allows your employees to collect information on their smartphones with utmost convenience? It not only allows them to save the information in real-time but also terminates the time spent writing on paper and then entering it on a PC.
In short, your organization is saving time, eliminating extra charges, and reducing errors.
Rapid Event Resolution
Resolving adverse events before they take place is the only key to reducing costs. When we look at some of the biggest recall cases, it becomes clear that if treated in the initial phase, these costly problems would have never arisen.
How does a Quality Management System help with rapid resolution?
QMS assists in determining the issues to be handled on priority:
If a business knows what should be handled as a top priority, costs are automatically reduced. The quality management system highlights the major issues that can cost a lot if left untreated. The major goal of QMS is quality and customer satisfaction. When a product has no faults, customers are already satisfied, and the quality is automatically revised.
Easy pinpointing of problems:
Finding issues is often a hectic and time-consuming task. A workforce is needed that can review a product multiple times to make sure that there are no possible errors. On the other hand, QMS easily pinpoints problems. It works step-by-step, which helps in reviewing the product at every phase.
Instead of firing in the air, you can opt for a quality management system that is the most systematic and guaranteed way to deal with problems.
Enhanced Production Yield
More production is equal to more revenue generation. If your organization has deployed a QMS, then you will be able to pinpoint issues in the first stage. You get more time to rectify them, and the costs of rectifying these issues are also very low.
Suppose your company works on a 5-Step process and the yield of every step is 80%. As a result, the yield will be lower and the cost will be higher.
But a quality management system can help you increase the yield at every step. When the yield reaches 90–95%, the output increases, and so does the business revenue. All the issues get streamlined, and that is what you need.
“Only 5–10% of increased yield can nearly double the production.”.
Quality as per compliance standards
Low quality drives more production charges and lower profits. But an advanced quality management system is equipped with tools that help businesses communicate, perform, and understand the needs of customers for the betterment of quality.
QMS helps companies determine the processes that are effective for achieving quality compliance while dropping the ones that are voiding compliance needs.
Sticking to and following quality management principles will help you drive more satisfied clients with the help of better services and products.
Immediate Visibility becomes possible
Entering data and information ratios into spreadsheets not only consumes feeding time but also takes a lot of time to review. Quality managers need to spend a lot of their time reviewing the information in search of common mistakes.
Fortunately, advanced QMS systems are capable of reviewing every process in real-time. An eagle’s eye view on what is happening and what will be generates a relaxed and nimble environment.
Final Words
A QMS is the need of the hour for every organization. Its successful implementation helps in attaining the balance between efficiency, quality, and profitability. All the steps involved in a quality management system are cyclic and recurring.
QMS verifies every phase of a manufacturing process and improves it with the help of live-data reporting. As a result, enhanced quality is maintained and costs are gradually decreased. As an added benefit, a business organization gets a detailed report with QMS. They also get to know the effectiveness of the Quality Management System by comparing it with their previous business model.
However, a QMS has a wealth of benefits if used wisely. So every company that is planning for a Quality Management System should make sure that their plan is foolproof. They also need to make sure that the plan is backed-up by another strategy if something goes out of the way.
“Customers are the ultimate stakeholders. And everyone knows that they place quality over everything; whether it’s price or buying factors. With the help of QMS, a company can reap more benefits while maintaining the loyalty of its existing and future customers”.
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