A Quality Management System for Organizational Improvement
A Quality Management System is a key to improving all aspects of your organization. Without such a system in place, you may not consistently identify quality issues in your organization, discover solutions to those issues, or implement the necessary strategies.
ISO 9001:2015 certification is turning out to be an effective tool for establishing an in-house quality management system. We have taken numerous organizations of all sizes through the ISO 9001:2015 certification process and have seen them make marked and long-lasting improvements in their organizations that have translated into increased profitability and new growth. Using ISO 9001:2015 certification to develop your quality management system allows you to achieve organizational improvement in many areas, including:
- Customer relations
- Leadership
- Employee involvement
- Decision making
- Supplier relationships
Establishing a Quality Management System
It is important to remember that achieving ISO 9001:2015 certification does not guarantee a long-lasting quality management system. Will management follow through on initiatives over the long-term? Will employees fully understand, the goals of your organization, and what they are expected to do to help achieve those goals?
Establishing a quality management system through ISO 9001:2015 requires:
- A thorough understanding of the elements of a management system
- A thorough understanding of ISO 9001:2015 and how the standard can be best used as a management system
- The ability to translate new expectations for quality in all departments to the employees who will be responsible for continuous execution
- Proper Quality and Business Skills Training
The Principles of Quality Management Systems
A quality management system for managing improvement generally includes aspects of (8) guiding principals. Here are a few of those guiding principles:
- Customer Focus including Benchmarking
- Leadership
- Employee and Management Involvement
- Process Approach and System Approach to Management
- Continual Improvement
- Factual Approach to Decision Making
- Mutually Beneficial Suppler Relationships
These principles seem familiar and are commonsense, yet many organizations cannot successfully implement them. The good news is that through proper ISO training and implementation, you can incorporate these fundamentals of organizational improvement into your quality management system.
A Benchmark for Better Performance: Your Quality Management System Impacts Organizational Performance
How well your quality management system functions in comparison to stipulated norms are a perfect benchmark to improve your organizational performance. This is because each employee is aware of the important variables required to control, create and improve performance and consistent product release while also enabling customer satisfaction.
Using your quality management system you can achieve:
- Improved employee relations
- Superior operating methods
- Enhanced customer satisfaction
- More profitable performance
To be successful and improve your customer expectations, your quality management system needs to be understood and translated to employees with realistic expectations and practical actions.
When organizations pursue ISO 9001:2015 certification with us, we help them leverage certain aspects of the process to optimize organizational performance:
- Customer focused organization: All organizations depend on customers. Your quality management system plays a major role in adding to your customer base. We improve your ability to identify your customers’ needs using your quality management system and existing customer satisfaction requirements within ISO 9001:2015.
- Leadership quality: Leaders are important to sail the boat to port. They control, convince and convey the purpose of the organization, its mission and its goal. They provide an internal training program for fine-tuning the effectiveness of the employee. They are trained to adapt to the available environment and achieve the organizational goal. Our ISO training services help you improve your leadership within your organization.
- Employee involvement: The quality of your company is determined by the quality of your employees. People need to be trained to be able to meet the company objective or nothing can be achieved. They are supposed to become well educated by your leaders and perfectly understand the company’s goal to enhance profitability by producing quality product or services. We install the right road-map so you can achieve this within your organization’s first term of certification.
- Positive approach to the process: If the management and the employee can clearly place the mission of ISO 9001:2015 certification in focus, with total involvement, then the organization can achieve success. The company’s leaders need a systematic approach to teach employees about continual improvement and how to achieve productivity by executing the job effectively and watching for waste, scrap and inefficiency, while being adaptable and using consistent execution. ISO 9001:2015 is not impossible to accomplish and has surprising benefits.
- Systems approach to management: The ISO 9001:2015 standard is based on the operation of your entity as a system. We help analyze your operations in this manner, enabling you to link the different departments into an interdependent business management system. A planned and monitored business management system improves the total effectiveness of the company.
- Continuous Improvement Process: Continuous Improvement Process (CIP or CI) is a process whereby customer delivery processes are constantly monitored and improved to be more efficient, effective and flexible. It breathes new life into organizations and saves money. We show you how to build an efficient, flexible and consistent approach for this activity.
- Decision making: Effective decision-making by management requires consistent feedback, adequate analysis and correctly aligned and implemented solutions. Creating the right environment for the decision-making process is one of the most valuable parts of any quality management system. ISO 9001:2015 management review techniques establish a foundation for improving decision making in your company.
- Supplier relationships: An organization without a supplier cannot run. The organization and its suppliers are interdependent and your suppliers and subcontractors performance affects your overall product and service quality, so supplier and subcontractor evaluation is an important factor to maintain quality in the organization.
Organizational Improvement Relates to ISO 9001:2015 Certification
Companies sometimes tend to have a parochial outlook with regard to quality management systems, concentrating solely on the direct operational costs of doing business. While the ISO 9001 standard will not solve all business problems, it can and does improve your internal processes when executed wisely.
Most companies go for ISO 9001:2015 certifications because of international market pressures; on the other hand, many adopt ISO because they need to improve quality and quality management systems internally. Lastly, some companies pursue ISO 9001 certification because a customer asked them to do so. The most important thing is to understand your company, specifically what your company wants to achieve from certification and what ISO 9000 certification can do for your company.
Don’t be in a hurry to place the cart before the horse. What is good for your organization long-term is almost always good for customers as well. Our staff has a solid understanding of the ISO standards and concepts.
- What is QMS (Quality Management Systems) certification?
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- What does an ISO consultancy and training organization actually do that makes the process quicker, less stressful and easy for us?
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- Other FAQ(s) Frequently Asked Questions that you might have.