What is Quality Management?
Quality management ensures that an affiliation, thing, or organisation is unsurprising. It has four principal parts, viz., quality masterminding, quality confirmation, quality control and quality improvement. Quality management is based on the thing and organisation quality, yet also on the assets to achieve it. Quality management, in this manner, utilises quality affirmation and control of cycles just as items to accomplish more reliable quality.
What a client needs and will pay for it decides the quality. It is a composed or unwritten obligation to a known or obscure buyer on the lookout. In this way, quality can be characterised as readiness for planned use, or all in all, how well the item plays out its expected capacity.
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TQM Example: One of the most renowned instances of all-out quality management is Toyota. Toyota executed Kanban System to make its mechanical production system more effective. Quality management is crucial to make unmatched quality things that meet just as outperform devour associations decided to keep enough inventories scarcely to fulfil customer orders as they were delivered.
Objectives of Quality Management
The main aim of an organisation for managing quality is to stay ahead of competition. The following are some important objectives of quality management:
- To improve quality of products or services through high accuracy and compliance with applicable standards
- To influence organisational culture by making people get involved in the quality improvement process
- To win the trust and loyalty of customers by providing them with quality products and services
- To identify errors in processes so as to ensure smooth and uninterrupted production
Importance of Quality Management
The quality of an item can be estimated as far as execution, dependability, and toughness. Quality is a vital boundary that separates an organisation from its rivals.
The following points explain the importance of quality management:
- Ensuring superior quality products and services: A product’s quality can be measured in terms of performance, reliability and durability. It is the quality that differentiates an organisation from its competitors and outperforms customers’ expectations.
- Achieving customer satisfaction and customer loyalty: It is of utmost importance for every organisation to have some loyal customers that give repeat business. However, the customers will come back only when the organisation provides them with quality products and services.
- Generating increased revenues and higher productivity: Implementing Quality management tools ensure high customer loyalty, thus better business, increased cash flow, satisfied employees, healthy workplace and so on. Quality management processes make the organisation a better place to work.
- Reducing waste and inventory: It enables employees to work closely with suppliers and incorporate “Just in Time” Philosophy.
Factors Influencing Quality Management
The outside factors like legislative issues, contenders, economy, clients, and climate are outside your ability to control however can have a gigantic effect on your association’s exhibition and achievement. Then again, inner components like cycles, staff, culture, and monetary circumstances can be constrained by you.
Elements influencing item quality are explained as follows:
Management
The concept of quality management starts from the top management. It is the top management which initiates the quality concept in an organisation. For this purpose, the top management creates a culture in the organisation where everybody is responsible for the quality. The commitment for quality is must from top management side.
Dedicated Employees
Every employee is responsible for the quality planning, quality production, quality delivery, quality after-sale service etc.
Suppliers
Suppliers supply machines and raw material to the company. As for example Tata Nano plant receives raw material and other component supplies from more than 600 suppliers. therefore, we can say that the suppliers play an important role as far as quality of product is concerned.
Inability to Change Organsational Culture
Changing an organisation‘s culture is difficult and requires as much as five years. Individuals resist change as they become accustomed to doing a particular process and it becomes the preferred way.
Management should understand and utilise the basic concepts of change which are as follows:
- People change when they want to and to meet their own needs
- Never expect anyone to engage in behaviour that serves an organisation‘s values unless adequate reason (way) has been given
- For change to be accepted, people should be moved from a state of fear to trust
Basic & Advanced Tools of Quality
There are various types of quality management frameworks. Some frameworks are in the form of standards that contain the set of requirements for implementing a QMS, whereas, some frameworks include quality management philosophies that can be used to improve quality. Let us briefly study about these quality frameworks:
ISO 9001
It is the most widely used standard that has been developed by the ISO. This standard defines a set of requirements that should be used for designing a QMS. The latest version of ISO 9001 was released in 2015, and it is written as ISO9001:2015.
AS9100
This is a standard specifically for the Aviation, Space and Defence (ASD) sectors. It is based on the ISO 9001 standard, but has additions specific to the ASD sector. It was developed by the International Aerospace Quality Group (IAQG). This standard can be used by suppliers to develop the requirements for creating and maintaining a comprehensive quality system. This is extremely important to provide safe and authentic products to the ASD industry. The current and latest version of this standard is the AS9100 Rev D, which is written as AS91100D. It is revised in the year 2016.
ISO 13485
This is a standard developed by the ISO specifically for setting out the requirements for QMS used by organisations that produce medical devices and related services to meet customer and regulatory requirements. Its current version is ISO 13485:2016.
Lean
Lean is a philosophy that emphasises on the maximisation of value by eliminating all wastes. This philosophy suggests that if anything adds cost to a product, but not value, it is waste. All such wastes should be controlled or eliminated. This philosophy can be used to support a QMS. However, it is not useful in designing a QMS.
MBNQA
The Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award is given to US organisations that demonstrate performance excellence. This award has set out a set of requirements that can be used by organisations to design and assess its QMS.
Six Sigma
This is a methodology that also contains a set of tools and techniques that are used by organisations for process improvement. It is not a quality framework, but can be used in many organisations to support the QMS by helping improve processes. It must be remembered that Six Sigma does not define a QMS, and the QMS cannot be certified in Six Sigma.
