What is quality management
Quality Management goes beyond just quality control and quality assurance. It includes all aspects that affect the quality of the organization, products, processes or services that you provide for you. Examples include ensuring the right working environment for your employees, improving the quality of your organization, promoting a culture of continuous improvement, obtaining quality certificates such as an ISO 9001 certificate, or complying with laws and regulations. Quality Management is therefore 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 basis for delivering consistent, reliable and high-quality products and services and provides insight into where your problems lie when there is a low level of efficiency within your organization. It gives you a framework for measuring and improving performance and helps you identify areas for improvement. It also ensures that your customer satisfaction is guaranteed and that your organization can work more efficiently and effectively. In short, by investing in quality management, you ensure long-term sustainable success.
Known benefits of quality management include:
- Reducing quality complaints
- Increasing efficiency
- Process-based work
- Continuous improvements
- Obtaining quality certificates
- Fact-based decision making
How do you start with quality management within your organization?
Step 1: Perform a baseline measurement
It's important to know where to start, which starts with performing a baseline measurement, also known as a baseline measurement. Here, you collect and analyze business data and conduct interviews and observations to gain insight into the current state of affairs.
For example, business data includes: 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 works in a structured and focused way 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 enormously in improving the performance of your organization.
The most important thing in setting quality goals is to ensure that they are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. You want to make sure your goals are clear and concrete so that you can measure whether you've reached them and they're relevant to improving your organization's performance.
A good starting point when setting quality goals is to determine the most important processes or areas you want to focus on. This can range from production 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 for improving your processes and increasing quality in the organization.
“Accurate planning with PDCA, working efficiently with Lean, targeted improvement with Six Sigma and structured organization with the 5S method — each instrument has its own strength, but together they form a powerful toolbox for continuous improvement.”
In addition, you can make use of standardized procedures, checklists and quality manuals. For example, this can contribute to better collaboration between teams. By establishing clear processes and procedures, employee expectations are better defined, reducing the risk 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 the willingness in the organization
To implement a management system in the organization, a crucial part is gaining willingness within the organization. It's about convincing your colleagues to go along with the changes that the system brings. After all, it is not enough to simply say that changes need to 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 extra motivation to make the system succeed.
You also want your employees to have the right skills, for example by organizing regular training courses and workshops to train your colleagues in quality control and process improvements.
Step 5: Keep improving
With quality control, you measure and assess the performance of your products or services against the set quality standards. This way, you can detect any anomalies and take corrective measures to prevent them from occurring in the future. Quality control includes various techniques and methods, such as inspections, audits, and tests, 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's also about continuously looking for ways to do things better, faster and more efficiently and is essential for delivering quality and minimizing risks. Why keep records manually when this 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 should you seek 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 continue to meet the standards, but you also ensure that your quality management is up to date and fits the needs of your organization so that you can be successful.
