Maintaining a quality management system (QMS) is important for a business to survive and grow in the business industry in the long run. Quality management systems can help businesses to meet their customer requirements as well as regulatory requirements while maintaining continuous growth and improvement in their operations.
A quality management system (QMS) is considered a system that documents the business policies, processes, and procedures that are necessary for the business organization to manufacture and deliver its products or services to the customers. Quality management systems ensure a consistent product or service quality that will help to increase customer satisfaction and long-term brand loyalty.
The quality management systems are often placed in order to provide consistency of the product or services made available in the target market. It is a system that ensures the customers that they receive the exact product promised by the product description and the same quality in every purchase of the customers.
There are eight main elements of a quality management system.
01. Organizational changes for quality management
When implementing a quality management system, any business organization should focus on developing a culture of quality to manage the changes in business activities due to system implementation. New system implementation can involve changing policies, procedures, facilities, SOPs, and standards. It is important to have a change management system that helps these changes without creating an impact on the ongoing business operations.
02. Employee training and development plans
Training and development of employees, improving employee engagement and employee motivation are the few most important factors of quality management and improvement. It is also identified that having highly skilled and motivated employees can help to improve the quality and the productivity of the business process. Apart from that, employees should be well educated about the quality expectations at each level of the production process. A comprehensive training management system should be maintained to ensure employees’ competency for the assigned tasks.
03. Calibration and maintenance of equipment to ensure safety
Safety of the production process as well as employee safety is a top priority when implementing a quality management system. Regular checks and maintenance should be performed to avoid any failures and injuries in the production process. In large-scale organizations, it is difficult to manually perform calibration and maintenance activities. Therefore, it is important to implement calibration and maintenance software that can handle equipment-related activities efficiently and effectively.
04. Ensure supply quality management
Supply quality management is the initial step of the high-quality end product. By managing the supplier quality ad raw material quality, the productivity of the production process can be improved and the waste can be reduced. Apart from that, the business should concentrate on the inventory activities such as storing the raw material properly and protecting them from damage.
To ensure proper supply quality management, supply quality management software used is identified as an ideal way as it can record, monitor, and streamline all the supply-related activities.
05. Risk Assessment
Risk assessment is mandatory when implementing a quality management system in a business organization. Risk assessment involves comparing the performance of the business process with the internal and external risk metrics such as internal risk guidelines and industry benchmarks. Risk assessments are usually conducted by the quality manager of the organization, an internal auditor, and an external quality inspector.
06. Process control
It is important to place appropriate process controls at each level of the production process to ensure consistent quality results. The quality control process includes classification of the production process, process management, verification of the quality control methods used, and validation and evaluation of the business process at each level.
07. Maintain documents and records about the quality management process
A business process produces a lot of documents related to the quality management process from the beginning to the end of the production process. It is important to ensure all this quality information is documented, recorded, and stored in a manner that can be accessed by the relevant parties when necessary.
08. Process improvements and audits
A quality management system in any business should continuously improve based on the changes in the business process as well as based on the changes in the industry. Apart from that, maintaining an audit management system will help the business to recognize and automate the significant improvements necessary for the quality management process.