Making Quality Management a Priority

Implementing a Quality Management System board could transform your business into a lean, competitive & trend setting company, saving you thousands of dollars as a result. If you are sceptical about the potential of implementing a Quality Management System, or if you in fact see it as extra unnecessary expense, here are just a few reasons why Quality Management is important within your organisation:

1. Communication
When focusing on Quality within your business, you begin to communicate with your customers to ensure that you meet their requirements, through either the products or services you provide. Meaning, you listen to what they need. You may realise that you have been making items that were not fit for purpose or, items which were not adaptable to changing customer requirements. Taking on this new information, you can now create what your customer specifically requires, improving their satisfaction with your products & services.

2. Organization
While implementing a Quality System into your business will take plenty of work, once procedures and processes are in place, things will begin to feel ‘organized’ within your business. Levels of communication automatically rise as procedures are followed and teams work together across various departments to establish and maintain quality. Organisation greatly improves employee morale and eliminates divisions across management tiers, as everyone must work together and take responsibility for their own actions.

3. Measurability
Implementing a Quality Management System means taking quantitative measurements of activities within your business, for example percentages of on-time deliveries and non-conforming parts. These measurements provide tangible benchmarks by which improvement can be determined. Measurements can be taken daily, weekly or monthly etc. Having this vital information leaves power with management to recognise when action is necessary to address unsatisfactory results and to implement changes.

4. Structure
Implementing a Quality Management System within your business creates a self-assessing system which creates improvements within your business. You are more in control of your systems and processes because you have defined them, documented them and monitored/measured and reviewed them. With this structure in place you can become compliant with many quality standards which are relevant to your type of business such as CE marking, ISO9001:2015 and ISO 14001. Because your system is now able to comply with such standards your business will have opportunities for growth and expansion into new markets.

ISO Terms Explained

To the novice quality manager, ISO jargon can be extremely overwhelming. What is an NCR? What do you mean by OFI? Are we certified or accredited? But before you go and pull out your hair, let’s take a moment to go over some of the most frequently used terms and their definitions with regards to ISO and Management System Certification.