Fundamental Elements of a Successful Quality Management Program

Quality Management System or QMS is a comprehensive approach to maintaining the product’s quality throughout its lifecycle. We live in a world where the time to market is the most crucial factor in determining organizational success. How quickly you produce the product, align it with the client’s quality standards, and launch it in the market matter the most. Quality management is not just about ensuring that the product quality is of a good standard, but it’s equally important that you follow practices that keep you aligned with the regulatory standards. Compliance is as important as the quality itself.

QMS is a framework that helps organizations produce products that meet regulatory requirements, are safe for the customers, and consistently meet clients' expectations. Quality measurement is a simple process. All you are supposed to do is inspect the production, processes, and material to ensure they meet the quality standards. When it comes to services, quality assurance involves checking the quality of the services to ensure that the customer gets what they are looking for.

What is Quality Management Program?

Quality Management Program, as mentioned earlier, is an indispensable part of all companies. Whether it’s a manufacturing unit or a healthcare system, it’s important that your products and services meet the quality standards and comply with the regulatory requirements.

Creating a QMS framework might seem like a challenging task. And while it may require a lot of documentation and inspection, QMS can actually be a cost-effective strategy. It saves you the time and cost of reworking the same project over and over again just because you couldn’t meet the required quality standards the first time.

Let’s check out the important elements of the quality management program.

Quality Policy

The quality policy serves as the foundation for all other processes in QMS framework development. This set of rules in the quality document will help ensure the smooth deployment of all strategies. The main purpose of the quality policy is to maintain consistency throughout product development and get guidelines that a company can follow to stay on the right track.

The first step in developing a quality management program is setting a quality policy. This document must be simple and clearly list all of your company’s vision, goals, and long-term objectives concisely. You can revise a quality policy in the future to incorporate changes, like a new vision, but since it’s a base for other elements, you should aim to get it right the first time.

Quality Manual

A quality manual is a list of the elements included in your quality management program, the ones excluded, a visual description of all processes you will implement to achieve these quality standards, and so on. The manual must also cover your quality policies.

Remember that a quality manual does not need to be a detailed list of the procedures. It’s just an outline of the processes and programs you will use to improve your quality standards. It’s mostly the combination of visual elements and texts. You can use flow charts, diagrams, and other visual tools to mention your objectives and processes in a clear and understandable format.

Quality Objectives

Objectives are the next important element of a quality management program. It encourages a customer-centric culture in a company and ensures that your short-term goals are aligned with the long-term objectives. You can match your performance with these objectives to get a better idea of what’s working and what requires improvement.

When drafting quality objective documentation, it’s important to be a little realistic instead of listing random stuff. It’s better to set quantifiable objectives that can be measured periodically and changed when needed. For instance, 50% of the new employee’s training should be completed within 10 days of hiring, and they should be fully trained and ready to fill in the vacant post within 25 days of hire.

Documenting and Recording

Document controlling means evaluating the impact of the changes in the document thoroughly before implementing them. All changes should be matched with the potential impact they will have on the final outcome.

This ensures that only changes that are completely aligned with your organizational objectives are implemented. In addition, all stakeholders and people associated with your company must be informed of these changes. You must revise the previous documentation with a new set of changes so that everything is recorded properly and all your documents are up-to-date.

It’s equally important that you keep records for each document as proof that all changes you have implemented in your workflow and QMS are inspected and approved. Examples include training records or complaint records.

Procedures

The primary goal of launching a quality management framework is to define standardized procedures that will be followed across all departments. Ideally, every procedure or responsibility is counted as a process in the quality management system. Even purchasing or sales is considered a procedure.

Everything that you use to convert the input into output is a process that helps you achieve your end product. The purpose of defining this process is to identify how these procedures interact with employees, machines, and other elements of your organization.

Continuous Improvement

A QMS is only valuable for a company when the procedures and elements you implement offer continuous improvement. The whole idea of a QMS is to streamline your management and use the most effective processes for achieving organizational objectives. You must be able to find areas for improvement, such as improving the project management methodology. If you are currently following a traditional approach, then shifting to the Kanban, Scrum, or agile framework can boost your organizational efficiency.

Bottom Line

QMS isn’t just the basic outline of the procedures, tools, and training methods used to achieve organizational goals. It’s rather a framework that guides organizations to achieve success and streamline the regular workflow. Using the quality management program, you can achieve customer satisfaction, align each project with your corporate strategies, minimize waste, and maximize your project’s efficiency. All that it takes is the correct implementation.