10 Steps to Achieve Quality Management Compliance
Managing an organisation’s quality management compliance ensures consistency with international guidelines and best operational practices. The following steps can assist your business in its goal to achieve compliance with quality standards.
Supporting an organization’s goals and objectives, an ISO 9001 Quality Management documents the procedures, processes as well as responsibilities for attaining quality policies and objectives. ISO 9001 standard outlines the way an organization functions to meet the requirements of its stakeholders and customers based on eight quality management principles
- Define Requirements. Define specific outputs, targets and objectives for each business process with the focus on quality to drive high customer satisfaction.
- Keep business processes and quality management processes as simple as possible. Consolidate and minimise business requirements and approvals without compromising on quality.
- Document the Process. Document the business process and have stakeholders review and approve each step to meet quality expectations. A quality management system should hold all this process data – step by step.
- Ensure stakeholder agreement. All stakeholders need to agree on the quality management process, with clear steps put in place and detailed instructions that meet the requirements for success.
- Define Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Document the main drivers of the quality process and determine how they affect change. Critically examine the required inputs and expected results.
- Measure Results. Measure the KPIs consistently for each business process and ensure any corrections and changes can be effected to optimise the process continuously.
- Assign Accountability. Perform consistent review of the KPI’s and hold the respective stakeholders accountable for the process.
- Automate the process. As complexity can lead to errors, firstly simplify the quality management process before proceeding with automation.
- Evaluate Improvement Opportunities. Develop a process to routinely evaluate quality standards and identify opportunities for improvement and innovation.
- Beware the pitfalls. Embrace lessons learned from the organisations’ team members or other companies to minimise catastrophic failures in the quality management process.
