Meaning of Quality Management 1

All those processes in a company that contribute to improving the structure and processes within the company are summarized under the term quality management. The influence of these measures is therefore very relevant company-wide, after all, a wide variety of areas are influenced by quality management.

Interesting facts about quality management

In this article we will deal with all questions about quality management, its possible applications, common models and standards, as well as the benefits of quality management. A holistic, structured overview of this topic should be offered.

What is quality?

According to Psyknowhow, the central question in advance is what the term “quality” actually means. It is difficult to bring such an abstract concept into a uniform form. For this reason, norms and standards, such as ISO, are being developed on an ongoing basis. To put it simply, these are uniform guidelines that can be measured objectively. In this way it can be clarified whether a certain standard, a certain quality, with an activity or a product, is achieved.

We can therefore state that quality is a certain condition that, depending on the good, can be difficult to measure or clearly defined. It is important that people have a uniform understanding of how the quality of a process, a good, etc. comes about, how it is defined and how it is measured. That sounds complex, but it simply means that it must be clear how the quality should be, how it can be checked and what it actually is.

The quality is also changing with the times, so that the understanding of quality and the demands on it are constantly changing. This means that customer requirements are growing steadily. Due to the mixing of the market and the possibility of comparison on the Internet, it is becoming more and more difficult for companies to win customers and, above all, to retain them.

What is quality management?

With quality management (QM for short) a company pursues the goal of achieving a certain quality of its products or services. This is attempted by planning, steering, controlling and improving processes and procedures. However, that does not mean that it always has to be the best possible quality. Even a “cheap producer” can use successful quality management. The goal here is not the best possible quality, but rather the achievement of a quality level that you have set yourself. The ISO 9001 and the quality management are much more flexible than some people assume.

So what exactly is quality management? Quality management is the oldest management system. This developed in the course of industrialization, when it was no longer sufficient to just check the quality of the end product. It had to be ensured in advance, in the production steps, which end result was to be achieved. Quality management has been continuously developed over the past decades and numerous tools have been found that support the continuous improvement process.

Quality management today no longer means simply taking a close look at the end product, but rather working more intelligently and efficiently . Quality management is therefore a control element of a future-oriented company.

Quality management objectives

The focus of quality management, regardless of the areas in which it is used, is to improve the internal structures and processes of companies in a structured manner and bring them to measurable standards. Less theoretically, this means that many companies try to become more efficient through targeted quality management and to make processes measurable. Regulating processes using clear standards – ideally, this leads to work being carried out more easily, quickly and in a controlled manner. At the same time, the communication effort is reduced and efficiency increases. All of this happens with measurable, comprehensible specifications (e.g. according to an ISO standard).

7 principles of quality management

In order to make the somewhat abstract quality management more tangible, seven principles were formulated in the ISO 9001 standardization. In short, these are as follows:

1. Customer orientation and sustainable success: Customer expectations should be met or exceeded, whereby customers can also be seen as people who follow a process within the company in the next phase. Thus, added value should always be created by at least meeting expectations – whether for external customers or for other people within the company.
2. Leadership and leadership: Good managers act as role models – this contributes to the success of the entire company.
3. Commitment of people: Good quality can only be achieved if the company has committed people who are motivated and can actively contribute.
4. Process-oriented approach: processes are the foundation of every company. They have to be continuously improved, especially at interfaces, because these are frequent sources of error. The organization is based on the processes.
5. Improvement process: Continuous improvement is one of the core objectives in quality management. This requires a systematic approach in order to find sources of error, to question oneself and thus to create constant further development.
6. Fact-based decision-making: Complexity makes it difficult to make the right decisions and subjective perception has an additional influence. It is therefore important to focus on clear data and base decisions on it.
7. Relationship management: All stakeholders should be actively involved. Your wishes must be recognized and taken into account in order to build relationships as holistically as possible inside and outside the company.