To
control, assure and improve
quality you need to focus on
certain goals. Let's call them the
quality goals. There follows some
key actions form which specific goals
may be derived:
-
Establish your customer needs and expectations - not doing this will certainly lead to unsatisfied customers.
-
Design products and services with features that reflect customer needs and expectations
-
Build products and services so as to faithfully reproduce the design which meets the customer's needs and expectations
-
Verify before delivery that your products and services possess the features required to meet the customer's needs and expectations
-
Prevent supplying products and services that possess features that dissatisfy customers.
-
Discover and eliminate undesirable features in products and services even if they possess the requisite features
-
Find less expensive solutions to customer needs because products and services which satisfy these needs may be too expensive.
-
Make your operations more efficient and effective so as to reduce costs because products and services that satisfy customer needs may cost more to produce than the customer is prepared to pay.
-
Discover what will delight your customer and provide it. (Regardless of satisfying customer needs your competitor may have provided products with features that give greater satisfaction!)
-
Establish and maintain a management system that enables you to achieve these goals reliably, repeatedly and economically.
ISO 9001
addresses quality goals through the use
of the term ‘quality objectives’ but
goes no further.
The purpose of
a quality system is to enable
you to achieve, sustain and improve
quality economically. It is unlikely
that you will be able to produce and
sustain the required quality unless you
organize yourselves to do so. Quality
does not happen by chance - it has to be
managed. No human endeavour has ever
been successful without having been
planned, organized and controlled in
some way.
The quality system is a tool and like any tool can be a valuable asset. (or be abused, neglected, misused!) Depending on your strategy quality systems enable you to achieve all the quality goals. Quality systems have a similar purpose to the financial control systems, information technology systems, inventory control systems, personnel management systems. They organize resources so as to achieve certain objectives by laying down rules and an infrastructure which, if followed and maintained, will yield the desired results. Whether it is the management of costs, inventory, personnel or quality, systems are needed to focus the thought and effort of people towards prescribed objectives. Quality systems focus on the quality of what the organization produces, the factors which will cause the organization to achieve its goals, the factors which might prevent it satisfying customers and the factors which might prevent it from being productive, innovative and profitable. Quality systems should therefore cause conforming product and prevent nonconforming product.
Quality
systems can address one of the quality
goals or all of them, they can be as
small or as large as you want them to
be. They can be project specific, or
they can be limited to quality control
that is, maintaining standards rather
than improving them. They can include
Quality Improvement Programmes (QIPs) or
encompass what is called Total Quality
Management (TQM). This book, however,
only addresses one type of quality
system - that which is intended to meet
ISO 9000 which currently focuses on the
quality of the outgoing product alone.
For further details of quality management systems see David Hoyle's Quality System Handbook
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