Quality Management Philosophies
Quality principles are important to focusing on and leading an organization toward a culture that embraces continuous quality improvement.
Quality management adopts a number of management principles that can be used to guide organizations towards improved performance.
Learning Objective
Recognize how top management can improve quality performance
Key Points
- There are eight primary quality management principles.
- The principles are the basis of the ISO 9001:2008 quality management system standard.
- One of the permanent quality objectives of an organization should be the continual improvement of its overall performance.
Key Terms
- value: The degree of importance you give to something.
- ISO 9001:2008: The ISO 9000 family of standards are related to quality management systems and designed to help organizations ensure that they meet the needs of customers and other stakeholders while meeting statutory and regulatory requirements related to the product.
- Quality Management: Process of ensuring that an organization or product is consistent. It can be considered to have four main components: quality planning, quality control, quality assurance, and quality improvement. Quality management is focused not only on product/service quality, but also the means to achieve it.
The Principles of Quality Management
Quality management adopts a number of management principles that can be used by top management to guide their organizations towards improved performance. The principles include:
- Customer focus: Since the organizations depend on their customers, they should understand current and future customer needs, should meet customer requirements, and try to exceed the expectations of customers. An organization attains customer focus when all people in the organization know both the internal and external customers and also what customer requirements must be met to ensure that both the internal and external customers are satisfied.
- Leadership: Leaders of an organization establish unity of purpose and direction of it. They should go for creation and maintenance of such an internal environment, in which people can become fully involved in achieving the organization’s quality objective.
- Involvement of people: People at all levels of an organization are the essence of it. Their complete involvement enables their abilities to be used for the benefit of the organization.
- Process approach: The desired result can be achieved when activities and related resources are managed in an organization as process.
- System approach to management: An organization’s effectiveness and efficiency in achieving its quality objectives are contributed by identifying, understanding, and managing all interrelated processes as a system.
- Continual improvement: One of the permanent quality objectives of an organization should be the continual improvement of its overall performance.
- Factual approach to decision making: Effective decisions are always based on the data analysis and information.
- Mutually beneficial supplier relationships: Since an organization and its suppliers are interdependent, therefore, a mutually beneficial relationship between them increases the ability of both to add value.
These eight principles form the basis for the quality management system standard ISO 9001:2008.
Source: Lumen Learning, https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-business/chapter/quality-management/
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