Businesses that have a particular management system for quality are found to prosper more than the ones that do not. A well-conceived and structured Quality Management System (QMS) enforces a set of ideal practices across the organisation’s processes and departments. Those practices when followed rightly intend to improve the quality of their final products or services and build the credibility of their business. While for this reason a QMS is now regarded as an indispensable part of business strategy, many organisations are perplexed with the complicated quality management implementation steps. Moreover, ineffective implementation of the QMS results in certain expenditures of your organisation but without resulting in any quality improvement. To prevent that and make your implementation worthy for your business, we have presented here a comprehensive step-by-step guide.
Following the below guide can help you to implement an well-organised QMS that not only improves your product or service quality but also protects your brand image and fulfils every customer interest.
A well-defined quality policy is considered the first requirement for successful implementation. It communicates the commitment of your organisation regarding quality. The main idea behind the policy is to provide what customers want. Therefore, while formulating the policy, customer satisfaction and consistent improvement should be given utmost emphasis.
Along with the policy, your organisation needs some definite objectives for laying the QMS. In fact, the objectives must be derived from the policy and must be realistic in the context of your business and customer requirements. Each of the quality objectives will also act as your business’s critical success factors and hence should be measurable. This will help you to track the progress of your QMS in achieving your quality objectives.
The next step is deciding the processes and practices that will describe your QMS. Your organisation’s top management team including the members who oversee quality control need to visualise the processes and practices needed in the QMS. They can determine them by analysing the quality policy and predetermined organisational objectives. Process mapping is a vital activity at this step where they need to decide the interactions or sequence between the processes. Mapping also helps in deciding who will be responsible for a particular process and what will be their roles.
One crucial condition for the successful implementation of the QMS is measuring the performance metrics at regular intervals. It enables you to confirm their effectiveness of your QMS. This can be done by collecting specific data on Key Performance Metrics (KPIs) and processing conclusive reports out of them for the leaders. Thus, what you need first for this is to decide what will be the KPIs for your quality management. Some of the commonly used KPIs are sales/productivity, customer satisfaction, market share, production costs, and customer complaints.
To lay the QMS, you need to document the processes and maintain day-to-day records in whichever format is appropriate. The mandatory sets of documents that you are required to develop are:
• Detailed information for each of the QMS processes
• Name of the employees or teams accountable for different processes
• Roles and tasks of the designated employees in each defined process
• Desirable outcomes and results to be derived out of each process
The employees who will be responsible to implement and use the QMS should have specialised skills and an understanding of the system. Training is the only way to ensure that. While most of the training sessions can be provided on the job, there are few things that must be taught to the employees beforehand. They include internal auditing competence, corrective actions implementation, FMEA training (which imply Failure Mode Effect Analysis), and reporting systems.
Implementation of the QMS is no doubt the prime step here. The QMS is intended to ensure the delivery of best quality products or services. To make the implementation flawless, you need to first find out the gaps and non-conformances in your existing quality management procedures. The QMS should be also implemented to address them. Then, following the documented guidelines, the employees should execute the processes of the QMS. To ensure that the implementation is successful, reviewing the performance metrics is necessary. Perform an internal audit and find out the issues still prevailing in it. After that, the management team needs to decide what remediation is required.
The QMS is not a one-time investment, but you should continually seek to improve it to ensure it is addressing your changing quality requirements. Also, the customers’ demand or quality expectations change from time to time. Thus, your QMS should be able to acknowledge them, and its processes can be scaled to meet them. However, for that, you need to conduct periodic audits and management reviews. They help to identify the key improvements required in your QMS according to the evolving circumstances and decide what corrective actions should be taken to materialise them.
Using the QMS enables you to collect insights or data and analyse them to measure the quality performance of your organisation. To better measure the performance, you can also determine new milestones and track whether the quality objectives are met. The goal is to find room for improvements, to have identified your performance trends through the collected data, and chosen new prospects that make difference to your quality management.
Clearly, these are the must-follow quality management implementation steps that assure a successful QMS and help you to prove your commitment to quality. However, for painless completion of each step what you most need is the proactive participation of your employees who understand your vision and a supportive management team. The team will designate employees, deploy resources, and provide elementary training to ensure both implementation and consistent improvement of your QMS.
Are you serious about implementing a strong and standardised QMS in your organisation? Compliancehelp can assist you to implement it cost-effectively with its team of dedicated quality assurance experts. We are just a call way. Get in touch!
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