7 Quality Management Principles and Why They’re Important
Guaranteeing the quality of products or services should be the foremost priority of every business. However, quality management is not just about enforcing certain practices that ensure every product or service is of excellent quality and meets the expectations of customers. It is also about establishing a quality management standard and following certain principles underlined by the standard. ISO 9001 is the world’s top quality management standard and the principles supported by it are applicable to almost all organizations, of any type or size. Hence, to assure the quality in your business, you need to first understand the importance of quality management principles and determine how you could abide by them. Those principles would work as guidelines for establishing an appropriate quality management system (QMS) in your organization.
You cannot fully comprehend the importance of the principles if you are not aware of what they are or how many principles are there. In this article we will provide a brief introduction to these principles.
7 Basic Principles of Quality Management
Any internationally recognized standard for quality management is based on fundamental principles.
1) Customer focus: This is inarguably the most crucial principle for quality management. Customers should always remain the focal point in your business, whether it is product-based or service-based. Knowing their expectations, what they most prefer, and how they want to consume your products or services must be evaluated to frame the scope of your QMS. Only then the QMS would be able to fulfill your prime objective i.e., higher customer satisfaction.
2) Leadership: Leaders and managers of your organization should guide everyone towards quality management and ensure that organization’s processes and strategies are aligned with the QMS. They should consistently monitor the quality performance and provide the resources required for undertaking quality practices.
3) Employee Engagement: The people or employees of the organization must recognize their contribution to quality management and sincerely work with the QMS. This principle necessitates training programs for every employee, including the new recruits. It ensures that they understand their role and accountability in quality management and is skilled enough to deliver them.
4) Process-based Approach: All processes in a business are interrelated and work in a specific sequence. This principle states that organizations should understand the interrelation between their processes and maintain that for ensuring consistency in their quality.
5) Continual Improvement: The quality management approach and practices adopted by an organization must be able to cope with the changing business environment, evolving customer expectations, and new opportunities to foster quality performance. This principle explains that your organization should deploy practices like internal audits and management reviews for continuous improvement of processes, policies, quality performance, and customer satisfaction.
6) Factual Decision Making: A quality management standard also puts importance on the collection and analysis of data. So the organizations are able to make the best decisions and put inputs into their processes based on insightful data that consequently influences the quality.
7) Relationship Management: To assure the quality of their products or services, businesses should always strive to foster good relationships with their suppliers, vendors, partners, employees and investors who directly contribute to their production. This last principle hence states that your organization should be able to build and maintain healthy relationships with everyone so that they understand your goals and quality objectives and remain aligned with them.
Importance of Quality Management Principles in Organization
It is quite impossible to have an effective and realistic QMS in your organization when you do not know what to change to meet the desired quality outcomes of your business.
Every organization needs a QMS and the quality management principles help them to develop it, implement it and improve it. These principles may have different context in different businesses, but they are the cornerstones of a QMS. They are certain norms and best practices that an effective QMS should put forth in a business to reduce errors, product failures, reworks, and quality issues. These principles are also the basis of international quality standards and many subordinate standards. Therefore, they are widely accepted by organizations across the globe irrespective of the industry or size of business. Thus, following these principles is a necessity for a business that strives to develop an efficient, organized, and value adding QMS.
To put it simply, quality management principles guide businesses to move their quality management program in the right direction. Secondly, abiding by these principles help them to easily prove their compliance with a quality standard and achieve certification. This clearly explains why you should give importance to the principles of quality management in your organization.
Developing a befitting QMS for your organization completely from scratch may seem challenging. These principles help you understand the framework of a QMS. These principles are actually a starting point and show up the way towards quality excellence.
Key Takeaway
Manufacturers or businesses, whether they just want to implement a feasible QMS or meet a quality standard, should adopt these principles according to the context of their business. They help to validate the customers and stakeholders that their business is operating in the most consistent and efficient way! They prove that the quality of end products is assured through strong leadership, employee engagement, better relationship management, enhanced decision-making, and many other persistent aspects of the business. This explains the importance of quality management principles as the driving force behind the development of a quality culture and an excellent quality management program.
If you need any assistance in implementing a robust QMS in your businesses, we at Compliancehelp Consulting LLC can help. We would help you understand these fundamental principles to comply with and make sure that you are also ready to achieve certification. Get in touch today!