QUALITY MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

What is a Quality Management System?

A Quality Management System is a structured system that processes, procedures, documents, responsibilities, and objectives for achieving quality policies. The purpose of a Quality Management System (QMS) is to help you achieve your business goals. Defining and implementing these targets can help decrease or eliminate quality defects and prevent future errors from occurring.

How can a QMS help you meet objectives?

You should have an existing plan in place to ensure that all your employees are working together toward a common goal.

A quality management system will fail if top management does not support it. An organization’s top management must be satisfied and educated about implementing a quality management system before such a program is implemented. Without top management commitment, the project will not succeed in implementing the plan, and the team will lose interest in the project in the future. It may lower resources to implement the system adequately or the resistance to help lead.

Setting up and Implementing a QMS

Once top management has approved to implement a quality management system, select a project leader. A quality management leader is responsible for steering the system and analyzing the companies’ current management practices to organize them.

Once you understand your company’s requirements, you need to specify the scope of the QMS. There are different requirements for different stakeholders, such as employers, employees, suppliers, contractors, community members, regulators, and the public at large.

Depending on your company’s size, your quality management system may consist of just one product from a single division or several divisions manufacturing a broad spectrum of products. The choice is yours.

By defining the scope and designing and implementing a quality policy, you will be able to effectively apply quality principles to your organization.
Follow this by identifying the authorities and responsibilities of any activity within the quality management system.

Once tasks have been assigned, it’s now time to plan, write and implement the quality management system. Your QMS should be process-focused, prevention-based and designed to counter any issues you may face.

A process-focused QMS can handle any process irregularity, which will lead to a variation in products and services. The process will ensure that your company is constantly operating to its best. A prevention-based QMS’s focus is to identify and prevent any errors from happening instead of fixing them subsequently. The aim of any quality management system is to ensure that your company has the correct tools to respond to issues that may arise. This gives you the ability to find the root cause and therefore minimize the possibility of it occurring again.