What is a Quality Management System?
A quality management system, hereinafter referred to as KMS, is a management tool for safeguarding and improving the quality of business operations. The system shows what the critical processes in the organization are, whether customer requests are processed correctly and in a timely manner, and whether your customers are satisfied or even loyal. In other words, as a company, you have properly arranged everything you say “what you do”, which is also true in practice: “do you do what you say?” After all, every customer wants to receive the quality they paid for. That is always the time that we want to deliver quality. Back in the Middle Ages, for example, quality was guaranteed through guilds. Knowledge and experience were exchanged in a guild. New guild members were trained in the profession. After this training, an apprentice could be recognized as a professional. This guild often had the exclusive right to practice that profession, which led to the certainty of the quality of the work. Working in guilds has been a thing of the past for a while, but 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), which were prepared by NATO and therefore have its origins in the military industry.
NATO developed the quality standards for its suppliers. The main reason for this was that she wanted to make sure that the right and high-quality materials were delivered to the front at the right time. As a supplier, you had to comply with this standard, otherwise you were not allowed to deliver.
Since 1987, the ISO 9001 standard revised and republished regularly. In the Netherlands, this standard is officially called NEN-EN-ISO 9001:2015. This standard followed his progress from 2008. The new standard is based on High Level Structure (HLS), which forms a framework and can be applied to all management systems. This structure applies to many other ISO standards and therefore makes it possible for a quality management system to be easily integrated with another management system such as the environment, health and safety and/or information security.
What does a good quality management system bring to your organization?
In addition to the fact that companies and organizations use a quality management system to improve their own processes, there are a number of advantages to working with a quality management system.
1. Reducing quality complaints
No matter how well your company functions, from time to time, delivering the product or service still comes to a complaint about the quality delivered.
This can relate to various aspects. For example, about delivery reliability, service provided or products that do not meet agreed specifications. One quality management system helps identify the causes, set out improvement actions and ensure the result. After all, you want to prevent the problem from occurring again in the future.
2. Increasing efficiency
Another motivation is that you want the company to work 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 your employee's individual performance is a limitation of efficiency opportunities. Working with a system means that all performance combined within the business process of your employees can lead to even higher efficiency instead of an individual approach to your employee's performance.
3. Process-based work
Working with a quality management system means thinking in terms of processes. Process-based work often provides useful answers: are the processes compatible? What are the inefficiencies and risks in the processes and how can they be solved? Who is actually the process owner?
4. Continuous improvements
When implementing a quality management system, a company usually also aims for a cultural change. A change that leads to a culture where people are constantly looking for ways to improve the quality of products or services. This is because employees experience that the company in which they work wants to continuously improve. If this is promoted by your company, a nice side effect is that employee satisfaction often also increases.
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 NATO alone, which asked about this with its AQAP standard. With a well-implemented quality management system, it will not be a difficult exercise for most companies to certify according to the ISO 9001 standard. Certification of the quality management system is often seen as a crowning achievement: a well-implemented system. When it comes to certification, a third party, the certifying body, has checked and assessed whether your company also works in accordance with the ISO standard.
Can a quality management system running on ISO2HANDLE capitalize on the benefits mentioned?
Developments have been rapid in recent years. While still working with parchment at the time of the guilds, with paper at the end of the last century, today is characterized by digitization. A digitized quality management system has all the advantages of working digitally. Would you like to know more about the benefits of working digitally? Then read our white paper. With regard to the five benefits mentioned, ISO2 HANDLE support the mentioned benefits as follows:
1. Reducing quality complaints
Within the quality management system of ISO2 HANDLE it is possible to set the causes for which you want to analyze the complaints, which department caused them and what recovery costs have been incurred. This information provides information to steer and take improvement measures and to stay well informed about whether measures are being implemented with notifications. By making graphs yourself, it is easy to understand where the biggest areas for improvement are in your organization.
2. Increasing efficiency
A quality management system within ISO2 HANDLE is set up as a system. All your employees can actively and quickly register quality records and retrieve appointments. In addition, everyone can quickly see the performance of the quality management system.
3. Process-based work
Your company can always decide for itself how its own processes are described.
Any form of description is provided by ISO2 HANDLE supports. A special form of process descriptions is the Turtle diagram. With this diagram, you can quickly, smartly and coherently map the various disciplines: how the processes in your organization are organized and what the performance is, who is competent, what resources are used and how this performance is measured. Inside ISO2 HANDLE 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 made clear. The PDCA circle is clearly found in the registrations that are entered into the system. Collecting documents to make this demonstrable is therefore a thing of the past.
5. Certification
If you're in ISO2 HANDLE setting up your quality management system, a certifying institution has the option to log into your system. This means you no longer have to search for all the documentation and registration that the certifying body's auditor asks for yourself. These are already available in ISO2 HANDLE and can be assessed by the auditor. This means that external audits can take place more quickly with less burden on your organization during this audit.
Would you like to know more about the possibilities? Then go to our contact page and get in touch with us today.
