Quality Goals

To control, assure and improve quality you need to focus on certain goals.

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 the way organization defines and achieves its quality objectives. 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.