Quality Management

Quality is vital to successful organisations.

At its simplest, quality is the standard of a product or service, as measured against similar products or services. But quality should be about much more than just making something without defects and getting it to your customers.

Quality can be measured. A product or service is expected to be able to do certain things and to last for a determined period of time. Customers drive the quality levels of products and services through feedback (both positive and negative) and the number of products they continually buy. If your products do not meet the expected quality standard, customers will stop buying from you.

Quality management is the measurement of performance of a product, service or process. It is about making organisations perform for their stakeholders, from improving products, services, systems and processes, to making sure that the whole organisation is effective. Managing quality means making sure that what your organisation does is fit for purpose, and not only stays that way, but keeps improving. Quality management can be applied throughout your supply chain.

The importance of quality is shown in this illustration: while cost, speed and dependability are all important to your organisation, they must be built on a foundation of quality to be enduring and effective.

It can be more difficult to measure quality in services than in products. This is because quality in services becomes subjective and a matter of opinion due to the intangible nature of a service. Tangible goods can be measured and assessed in terms of quality so as to prove that they conform to the specification. Services are delivered by people who by definition are inconsistent in their approach to a quality requirement. Collecting data on quality performance in a service environment can also be an issue.

Good quality management is underpinned by eight principles:

• Customer focus
• Leadership
• Involvement of people
• Process approach
• Systems approach to management
• Continuous improvement
• Factual approach to decision-making
• Mutually beneficial supplier relationships

These principles are at the heart of ISO 9000, the quality management standards for companies and organisations around the world. These standards will help you to meet customer and other stakeholder needs and regulations. Increasingly, customers will look to see if you are able to meet these internationally-recognised standards, and also you can check to see if your own suppliers comply with the ISO 9000 standard.