Quality Management: Concept And Main Advantages
What is the best way to guarantee a better production flow to offer a good product to your customer? The good news is that there isn’t just one, but know that they all depend on good quality management.
In your business, is this issue one of the priorities of managers, in which resources are invested?
If the answer is negative, it is possible that we have found the origin of several problems in your business, such as the impossibility of growth and low competitiveness. And don’t think it’s an exaggeration: quality management really has this weight in the success or failure of a company.
It is no coincidence that this is a topic that is evolving at a fast pace in various spheres of business and in different market sectors. And your organisation seeks to differentiate itself from the competition and offer a solid differential to attract more customers and ensure their satisfaction. It is time to implement quality management.
In this context, we at ExFro will explore the topic as a whole: concept, goals, importance, principles, and how technology can help in its implementation.
Read on to keep learning!
What is Quality Management?
Quality management is the exercise of supervising the activities, tasks, and processes (inputs) used in the creation of a product or service (outputs) so that they can be maintained at a high and consistent level.
In Total, Experts Consider Four Main Components of Quality Management:
- Quality planning;
- Quality guarantee;
- QA;
- quality improvement.
The implementation of these four components in an organisation is known as total quality management (QMS).
Quality management focuses not only on the quality of the results (products and services), but also on the inputs: the tasks and processes by which the results were created.
What is the Purpose of Quality Management?
Quality itself is not a program or a discipline. It doesn’t end when you reach a specific goal. Quality needs to live in an organisation with a well-established Quality Culture, where each person experiences and understands the need to be dedicated to its values.
Quality is a continuous race for improvement with no finish line. Something essential in the industry. On a more general level, quality means doing the right thing for your customers, your employees, your stakeholders, your business, and the environment in which we all operate.
In other words, this means that when we talk about quality management, we are not restricted to the products of a company, but to the entire work environment. By implementing quality management, the company not only ensures its product inspection processes.
It is something that goes far beyond checking processes. It’s really about creating a global quality culture on the corporate scene, something that impacts the company from start to finish. Thus, ideally, quality management influences the entire production process.
Hence, the quality of a product or service is not only increasing, but the process by which that product or service is created is getting better and better, achieving more consistency and higher quality products and services, and this is only possible with the use of supporting technology.
How Does Quality Management Work?
Quality management works with the use of technologies, assertive strategies, and the intense participation of the company’s employees. And all this depends on the support of the managers, who must understand the importance of the issue, after all, they are the ones who will collect and ensure that this process is taking place among the employees.
Thus, once applied, quality management will seek to examine all processes related and correlated with production. The intention, therefore, is to use tools and frameworks that standardise some executions.
The business can then develop a quality rule for each of the operation’s micro and macro processes in this way. In addition, quality management works with the help of a technological system that allows control of operations.
After all, within the premise of the concept, there is a need to visualise executions transparently. Thus, in addition to a truly assertive decision-making power, those responsible for applying the quality guidelines can monitor their performance in real time.
This allows them to balance the operationalization of quality management with the expected standard so that everything always remains at the same level.
How Crucial Is Quality Management to Businesses?
The existence of quality management is already a prerogative so that there is a quality standard for your business. This is important because it is basically the definition of clear criteria that indicate how the company must produce in order to achieve the results.
In other words, it’s like developing a process for literally every aspect of your business, from hiring to getting work done to managing customer service and managing risk.
Some Benefits Include:
- Risk reduction;
- Increased efficiency;
- Reduction of human error;
- Creating consistent results;
- Improved team skills;
- Reduction of training time for new personnel.
At the end of the day, a growing company that has clear processes is bound to have a much smoother development journey than an organisation without defined quality management.
What are the Top 7 Principles of Quality Management?
The International Standard for Quality Management (ISO 9001:2015) defines a series of management principles that aim to guide organisations toward better performance in quality management.
The Top 7 Quality Management Principles Are:
1. Focus on the Consumer
The primary focus of quality management should be to understand, meet, and exceed the needs of current and future customers.
Organisations must align their objectives and goals with customer requirements.
2. Leadership
The leadership and management of the organisation must establish a purpose and direction for the organisation.
They must engage employees, recognize their contributions, and equip them with the tools and training they need to achieve the company’s quality objectives.
3. Relationship Management
To sustain growth, organisations must build and manage relationships with interested parties, such as suppliers.
They must recognise vendor successes and pursue improvement and development activities.
4. Continuous Improvement
All organisations must focus on continuous improvement to improve performance and capabilities.
All levels must be empowered to make improvements, and those improvements must be measured consistently.
5. Commitment of the People
Businesses must help foster competent, capable, and committed people at all levels of the organisation to enhance their ability to create and deliver value.
6. Process-based Approach
Leadership and staff must understand what the activities are and why they are important.
Activities must be managed as interrelated processes that work as a coherent system to ensure consistent and predictable results.
7. Fact-Based Decision Making
Companies must make decisions based on accurate and reliable data that configures facts.
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What Are the Advantages of Implementing Quality Management?
By investing in the implementation of a quality management plan, using the appropriate resources and technologies, your business can experience several benefits.
By now, you must have unraveled some of them, right? Next, we will explain some of the main advantages of Implementing Quality Management, see:
Increased Productivity
Without reworking, or flooding the operational routine, the company can organise daily operations more efficiently.
Thus, with strict quality control, it is possible to manage projects from their conception, ensuring that each step of production is carried out according to quality guidelines.
This essentially impacts the productivity of the team, whether in the back office or the front office, as well as on the shop floor.
It is one of the direct results of standardisation.
Process Control
Quality management allows your team to manage resources, such as a technological operating system, giving you deeper insight into each process.
This makes it much easier and more accessible to watch production in real time, ensuring that all deliveries meet requirements.
In addition, there is a factor related to process automation, which streamlines executions and reduces errors.
Customer Satisfaction
There is no escaping obvious: people and companies pay for and expect quality products or services.
As customers, we all look for solutions, not more problems.
Quality management is the most effective means of ensuring that this happens, improving customer satisfaction.
After all, a satisfied consumer is also a happy consumer, better suited both to be a loyal buyer and to promote the brand.
Better use of Resources
Do not think that the impact of quality management is restricted only to the operational part of the business.
On the contrary, its application can have a positive impact on other areas, such as inventory management.
After all, with pre-established processes and defined production guidelines, it is possible for the team to make more efficient use of resources. In other words, it avoids rework and even reduces costs that, before, weighed heavily on the organisation’s pocket.
