Ensuring consistent quality can be a real challenge. It’s common to race against the clock to meet tight deadlines–but the dilemma is how you can maintain efficiency without compromising the quality of your products. A Quality Management System (QMS) is your competitive advantage. It standardizes processes, minimizes errors, and ensures compliance with industry standards, allowing you to meet high levels of customer satisfaction.
For example, a car parts manufacturer is struggling with frequent defects. By implementing a QMS, they can identify root causes and massively bring down error rates.
In this guide, we’ll show you the essential components of a QMS and give you practical steps so you can implement it in your organization.
What is a quality management system?
Regardless of your industry–from healthcare and food production to software development or construction–quality management is an essential part of any project. Manufacturers and other businesses need to be able to guarantee that their products are made to internal and external quality standards and are safe for consumers.
This is where a Quality Management System (QMS) comes into play. A QMS is a structured framework that standardizes your quality assurance processes, making it easier to maintain consistent quality across all operations. The video below breaks it down in detail:
A thorough QMS includes a detailed quality management plan that:
- Tells your workers how to evaluate product compliance. It provides clear instructions and criteria for checking whether products or services meet the required quality standards.
- Keeps manufacturing errors from carrying over to final products. Since issues are identified early on, a QMS helps to minimize defects, resulting in only high-quality products reaching the consumer.
- Allows you to set and stick to project deadlines. A QMS streamlines workflows and processes, enabling you to meet deadlines without compromising on quality
Key elements of a quality management system
Building an effective Quality Management System (QMS) is like constructing a solid foundation for your business. These elements ensure that your products or services consistently hit the mark, keeping your operations running smoothly.
Quality policy, objectives, and planning
A robust QMS starts with a clear quality policy that acts as a guiding principle. It should be a concise statement that considers the organization’s strategic goals and customer expectations.
Once you have the quality policy, you’ll also set measurable quality objectives that are specific and attainable. Effective planning is essential to achieve these objectives, including identifying necessary processes, resources, and responsibilities.
Process management and documentation
This lies at the core of your QMS. It’s all about managing and documenting the key processes that directly affect the quality of your products or services. You’ll define each process clearly and keep on monitoring them.
Controlling documents is equally crucial. Without proper documentation, the entire setup can easily become disorganized. Documentation ensures that everyone knows where to find the latest procedures, guidelines, and standards, reducing the risk of mistakes and miscommunication.
Resource and organizational management
For this component, you’ll verify that you have the necessary resources—whether it’s skilled personnel, state-of-the-art infrastructure, or the right tools and equipment. With these resources available and well-maintained, you set the stage for achieving your quality objectives.
Equally important is clearly defining roles and responsibilities. When everyone knows their specific role and how it contributes to the overall quality goals, it fosters accountability and teamwork.
Measurement, analysis, and improvement
Regularly tracking processes and products against quality objectives is part of a QMS. You’ll systematically check performance metrics and analyze the data. This way, you can uncover patterns, pinpoint root causes of issues, and identify areas for improvement.
Of course, this also means taking action. Corrective actions address immediate issues, while preventive actions are proactive, eliminating potential problems before they can happen.
Customer focus
Doing quality management essentially means putting customers at the center of everything you do. First, develop a deep understanding of customer needs and expectations by actively listening to your customers and getting their feedback.
You can then use this feedback to drive continuous improvement throughout your organization. Review customer input regularly and then make the necessary changes to your workflows, products, or services to better meet their needs.
All in all, these are the main components of the quality management process:
Approaches to quality management
Since quality management is an age-old concern for businesses, there have been diverse quality management approaches over time. Each approach offers unique principles and techniques.
- Total Quality Management (TQM) – focuses on long-term success through customer satisfaction. All members of an organization participate in improving processes, products, services, and the culture in which they work.
- Six Sigma – a data-driven approach that aims to reduce defects and variability in processes. It uses statistics to identify and remove causes of errors, with the goal of near-perfection.
- Lean manufacturing – emphasizes maximizing value by eliminating waste and optimizing processes. It aims to provide more value for customers with fewer resources.
- ISO 9001 – an international standard that actually lists down requirements for a QMS. Organizations use the standard to show that their products and services meet customer and regulatory requirements.
- Kaizen – literally means “continuous improvement” in Japanese. Everyone in the organization, from top management to frontline employees, makes small, incremental changes to improve processes.
All of these have been effective for various organizations, depending on their specific needs and goals. For example, ISO 9001 is widely used across different industries, while automotive companies tend to use Lean Manufacturing or Six Sigma.
What should your quality management plan include?
Aside from choosing your approach, you need to craft a quality management plan to implement a QMS. This describes every action you will take in order to meet your (or an outside regulatory) organization’s quality standards. As a starting guide, you can use these quality management plan templates that we curated and edit them based on your needs.
A quality management plan includes four key steps:
- Defining quality standards
- Designing a quality assurance process
- Creating quality control measures
- Improving quality management plans through quality improvement
Defining quality standards
Product quality standards detail the characteristics of finished products; in other words, the desired outcome of a manufacturing process. To understand the criteria you need to meet, ask:
- What are the customer’s quality expectations?
- What regulatory standards need to be met?
- What are your internal quality standards?
- Are there already product quality guidelines to follow?
You can more easily understand quality expectations by asking customers directly and by using reputable standards like ISO 9001 to guide you. Additionally, make sure to look up applicable industry regulations.
Designing a quality assurance process
Quality assurance is the next step after defining what your standards are. It boils down to formally writing out the tools and processes you will use to implement said standards. Thorough quality assurance means ensuring:
- There is documentation for all regulatory requirements
- That you specify and communicate customer requirements
- There are checklists available to employees that describe compliant processes
- Workers have the training necessary to execute those processes
- Product specifications are clear to workers, either through examples of quality products, diagrams, or itemized lists of requirements
- Workers have access to well-maintained tools or equipment
- Employees are aware of the parties responsible during each stage of production
- Equipment for measuring quality metrics have gone through testing beforehand
Creating quality control measures
Where quality assurance is focused on ensuring that processes are clearly defined and easy to follow, quality control looks at finished products to ensure there are no defects before goods are shipped out. Both are vital elements of a quality management plan, since quality control essentially tells you whether your quality assurance measures were effective.
Quality control measures that strengthen your overall quality management strategy include:
- Visually inspecting products for cracks, dents, or scratches
- Ensuring there is no water damage to products
- Checking products for dirt and debris
- Verifying that finished products are the correct size
- Ensuring that product colors are correct and details (like iconography on buttons) are clear
- Making sure products are the correct weight
- Testing the product at least once to ensure it functions as intended
- Ensuring product packaging is clean, undamaged, clear, and able to fit the product comfortably
Improving quality management plans through quality improvement
Quality improvement is where you weigh the expected results of your quality assurance processes with the actual observations you made during quality control. The purpose of this is to figure out where there were unexpected outcomes or failures in production.
From there, you’re able to go back and improve your quality management planning so that your quality management checklist produces compliant products every time. As an example, you might find that there are a number of damaged products because of improper use of equipment. In your revised quality management plan, you would indicate the correct way to use said equipment.
The exact questions you ask during quality improvement vary based on the quality management issues you encounter in your business. What’s important is that you remember the focus is on process improvement, and not on individual employee performance.
Getting the most out of your quality management plan
When applying your quality management plan to manufacturing work, there are a few things you can do to make all the work involved easier to manage and increase the chance of positive results.
Delegate
Writing a good quality management plan involves everyone, and so should implementing it. Ensure that you’ve clearly broken down tasks and roles and assigned them to appropriate team members. Use an employee’s skills and experience to find tasks that suit them well.
List all your materials
Make sure you know and have everything you need before starting production. Use a bill of materials template to list out which materials and equipment you need and when you’ll use them. The more information you give your workers, the fewer deviations will occur.
Define approval criteria
Make sure you know what a properly finished product looks like, and share the criteria with your team. Use the quality standards you identified earlier in your quality management plan to establish these criteria, which should be as specific as possible.
Test periodically
To be as confident as possible in the quality of your products, conduct regular testing. For example, inspecting each component before moving to the next allows you to identify problems earlier and to understand exactly where problems occur. Regularly testing allows you to examine functionality from every angle.
Designing quality management systems with workflow automation software
A paper-based quality management plan is impractical for several reasons; it’s easy to lose, it’s difficult to make copies efficiently, and it’s impractical to carry around sheets of paper with you during work. Solve all of these problems by using Lumiform’s workflow automation software to create your quality management plan.
Lumiform offers you a combination of desktop and mobile applications that make it easy for you to design custom templates each time you start a manufacturing process. Use these quality management templates to make sure you’ve defined every component of your quality management plan.
You can easily share these quality checklists with others in your organization, as well as duplicate them with a single button press. Verify that your quality management plan is being followed by assigning its completion to responsible employees.
Use Lumiform to develop project quality management plans and:
- Delegate responsibilities, set deadlines, and track performance from one centralized dashboard
- Share results and progress reports with stakeholders at any time
- Standardize how your team completes tasks, since everyone will be following one quality management document
- Never worry about storage or damage to your files, since every template you make with Lumiform is saved to the cloud
- Automatically generate reports which summarize and analyze the results of completed templates, and help you improve in the future