7 Principles of Quality Management [Explained]

Principles of Quality Management

Since ISO i.e. international standard of Organization, 9001 has been established around the world different experts have suggested 7 key principles for better organizational performance. ISO 9001 is a catchy name for measuring the quality of an organization’s products. Let’s discuss these principles of quality management one by one.

Customer Focus

The first principle of quality management states that organizations should be customer-focused. Customers are the key to business success, without customers businesses would not survive.

It is the duty of you as a manager to understand your past, present as well as potential customers. Performing well on customers’ expectations is the best way to sustain your business.

Study how well your product has reached the customers, understand the changing preferences of customers, and offer them products or services that best meet their expectations. This increases their level of satisfaction and provides also return to the organization.

Leadership

Your business should have a vision and a strong leader to circulate it to all the employees. Vision should be realistic and should not only be based on assumptions only.

Organizations should have a clear vision and strong leadership to communicate it to all members in a way everyone agrees to work on it. You should be able to make your whole team work on the same objectives. Everyone should have a sense of shared understanding of the quality objective of the organization.

Involvement of People

Every employee of the organization has a crucial role in the success of the organization. A single person can not run the whole organization. As such, different people are involved in the organization – cooperation and understanding between them are necessary for the smooth performance of the organization.

This principle of quality management states that every employee’s importance should be noted and contributed to the organization. Participative management is an effective way to make people engaged in the organization.

For this, it is necessary to understand each and every employee and respect their differences. You should ensure everyone is motivated and engaged in the firm not by force but by their willingness.

Related: Dimensions of Quality

Process Approach

This principle is about maintaining efficiency and effectiveness in organizational operations. For the process approach to work well, it is important that everyone should understand what are these activities and why they are important.

Companies’ interrelated activities should be managed in processes that function seamlessly as a coherent system. Everyone should be aware of the input, process, and output systems.

If they give something input the system should process automatically and give end results. This ensures companies achieve consistent and predictable results effectively and efficiently.

Continuous Improvement

One secret for businesses today to become successful is to make continuous improvements to their strategies, products, policies, and performance. This principle states companies should make continuous improvements to their activities.

ISO 9001 quality management system states that one of your business’s main objectives should be a continual improvement of its core functionality.

As it is obvious that, customers’ tastes, preferences, competitors’ strategies, market conditions, government policies, and business settings are changing rapidly. To fit with such changes it is necessary you should also change your business strategies and policies.

Evidence-Based Decision-Making

This principle states that decisions that you make should be based on facts. Effective decisions are those which are made based on rational analysis of data.

Before making decisions make sure to gather reliable and accurate data. Data should be from reliable sources. This helps to make the right decisions which ensures the achievement of desired results.

If you make decisions with your feelings, it might work luckily one time but won’t sustain for the long term. Thus, it is necessary to make decisions based on reliable data, and if the plans fail you will have the information to access at any time.

Relationship Management

One of the principles of quality management is relationship management. This principle mainly focuses on developing mutually beneficial relationships with suppliers.

To sustain growth and survive in the long run organizations should build long-lasting relationships with related parties such as suppliers, retailers, investors, etc.

The quality of your products largely depends upon the raw materials you use to produce products. Maintaining a good relationship with your supplier can literally be your source of being competitive in the market.

As the relationship is built on trust, never fail to work on promises you made to suppliers, pay on time, and ensure the relationship is mutually beneficial.

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