Quality Management System

An organization will benefit from establishing an effective quality management system (QMS). The cornerstone of a quality organization is the concept of the customer and supplier working together for their mutual benefit. For this to become effective, the customer-supplier interfaces must extend into, and outside of, the organization, beyond the immediate customers and suppliers...... A quality management system (QMS) can be expressed as the organizational structure, procedures, processes and resources needed to implement quality management. Early systems emphasized predictable outcomes of an industrial product production line, using simple statistics and random sampling. By the 20th century, labor inputs were typically the most costly inputs in most industrialized societies, so focus shifted to team cooperation and dynamics, especially the early signaling of problems via a continuous improvement cycle. In the 21st century, QMS has tended to converge with sustainability and transparency initiatives, as both investor and customer satisfaction and perceived quality is increasingly tied to these factors. Of all QMS regimes, the ISO 9000 family of standards is probably the most widely implemented worldwide. A QMS can be defined as: “A set of co-ordinate activities to direct and control an organization in order to continually improve the effectiveness and efficiency of its performance.” These activities interact and are affected by being in the system, so the isolation and study of each one in detail will not necessarily lead to an understanding of the system as a whole. The main thrust of a QMS is in defining the processes, which will result in the production of quality products and services, rather than in detecting defective products or services after they have been produced.