Quality Management

The term quality management has a specific meaning within many business sectors. This specific definition, which does not aim to assure 'good quality' by the more general definition, but rather to ensure that an organization or product is consistent, can be considered to have four main components: quality planning, quality control, quality assurance and quality improvement. Quality management is focused not only on product/service quality, but also the means to achieve it. Quality management therefore uses quality assurance and control of processes as well as products to achieve more consistent quality. Principles: Quality management adopts a number of management principle that can be used by top management to guide their organizations towards improved performance. The principles include: Customer focus: Since the organizations depend on their customers, therefore they should understand current and future customer needs, should meet customer requirements and try to exceed the expectations of customers. An organization attains customer focus when all people in the organization know both the internal and external customers and also what customer requirements must be met to ensure that both the internal and external customers are satisfied. Leadership: Leaders of an organization establish unity of purpose and direction of it. They should go for creation and maintenance of such an internal environment, in which people can become fully involved in achieving the organization's quality objective. Involvement of people: People at all levels of an organization are the essence of it. Their complete involvement enables their abilities to be used for the benefit of the organization. Process approach: The desired result can be achieved when activities and related resources are managed in an organization as process. System approach to management: An organization's effectiveness and efficiency in achieving its quality objectives are contributed by identifying, understanding and managing all interrelated processes as a system. Continual improvement: One of the permanent quality objectives of an organization should be the continual improvement of its overall performance. Factual approach to decision making: Effective decisions are always based on the data analysis and information. Mutually beneficial supplier relationships: Since an organization and its suppliers are interdependent, therefore a mutually beneficial relationship between them increases the ability of both to add value. These eight principles form the basis for the quality management system standard ISO 9001:2008. Quality improvement: There are many methods for quality improvement. These cover product improvement, process improvement and people based improvement. In the following list are methods of quality management and techniques that incorporate and drive quality improvement: 1. ISO 9004:2008 — guidelines for performance improvement. 2. ISO 15504-4: 2005 — information technology — process assessment — Part 4: Guidance on use for process improvement and process capability determination. 3. QFD — quality function deployment, also known as the house of quality approach. 4. Kaizen — 改善, Japanese for change for the better; the common English term is continuous improvement. 5. Zero Defect Program — created by NEC Corporation of Japan, based upon statistical process control and one of the inputs for the inventors of Six Sigma. 6. Six Sigma — 6σ, Six Sigma combines established methods such as statistical process control, design of experiments and failure in an overall framework. 7. PDCA — plan, do, check, act cycle for quality control purposes. (Six Sigma's DMAIC method (define, measure, analyze, improve, control) may be viewed as a particular implementation of this.) 8. Quality circle — a group (people oriented) approach to improvement. 9. Taguchi methods — statistical oriented methods including quality robustness, quality loss function, and target specifications. 10. The Toyota Production System — reworked in the west into lean manufacturing. 11. Kansei Engineering — an approach that focuses on capturing customer emotional feedback about products to drive improvement. 12. TQM — total quality management is a management strategy aimed at embedding awareness of quality in all organizational processes. First promoted in Japan with the Deming prize which was adopted and adapted in USA as the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award and in Europe as the European Foundation for Quality Management award (each with their own variations). 13. TRIZ — meaning "theory of inventive problem solving" 14. BPR — business process reengineering, a management approach aiming at 'clean slate' improvements (That is, ignoring existing practices). 15. OQM — Object-oriented Quality Management, a model for quality management.