QUALITY MANAGEMENT SYSTEM AT A GLANCE.
Quality management system (QMS) is a part of the management system regarding quality.
The management system is a set of interrelated elements of an organization to establish policies, objectives, and processes to achieve those objectives.
A QMS helps direct an organization’s activities. It also helps to coordinate organizations’ activities to meet customer and regulatory requirements to improve its effectiveness on a continuous basis.
However, ISO 9001:2015 is the most prominent approach to quality management systems. It is the international standard that specifies requirements for quality management systems.
While some use the term QMS to describe the ISO 9001 standard or the group of documents detailing the QMS, it refers to the entirety of the system. The documents only serve to describe the system.
History of the Quality management system.
The history of quality can discover its roots back centuries when craftsmen began settling into unions called guilds. During the Industrial Revolution, early quality management systems were used as standards that controlled product and process outcomes.
While more men worked together to produce output and production quantities grew, best practices were needed for quality results.
Eventually, best practices for checking product and process outcomes were ascertained and documented. As a result, these documented best practices turned into standard practices for quality management systems.
Quality became very important at World War II, e.g. when bullets made in one state had to work with rifles produced in another state. The armed forces had to inspect every unit of the product virtually, and they used quality sampling techniques for inspection and to make sure the products work very well.
The value of quality only increased after the war. As a result, the Japanese had a quality revolution, improving their reputation for shoddy exports by fully adopting the input of American thinkers such as Joseph M. Juran and W. Edwards Deming and shifting focus from inspection to improving all company processes through the people who used them.
Consequently, by the 1970s the U.S. industrial sectors such as electronics and automobiles are at a match with Japan’s high-quality competition.
Purpose of QMS.
• Improving processes
• Reducing waste
• Lowering costs
• Facilitating and identifying training opportunities
• Engaging staff
• Ensuring the consistency of results.
• Ensuring the Prevention of mistakes.
• Setting organization-wide direction
Benefits of QMS.
Executing a QMS affects every aspect of an organization’s performance. Two overarching benefits to the design and implementation of documented quality management systems include:
• Meeting the customer’s requirements, which helps to infuse trust in the organization. And in turn creating more customers, more sales, and more repeat business.
• Meeting the organization’s requirements, which shows compliance with regulations and provision of services and products in the most cost- and resource-efficient manner.
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