How to write a Quality Management System?
Quality is at the heart of any successful business. If a company doesn’t provide a quality product or service, they soon struggle to continue conducting business as they have reduced their customer satisfaction. So, the aim of any quality system is to create a virtuous circle that improves the quality of the product or service that increases the customer satisfaction.
Define Your Quality Map
One of the first exercises that should be conducted is to map out the processes that your business goes through. This will help identify all of your stakeholders, any areas where quality functions are necessary and any potential bottlenecks.
Define Your Quality Policy
What is it that your customers want from you? If you can identify all of the factors that your customers, consider when deciding if the service/ product you provide is of a high quality then you can begin to structure your policies and behaviours around those.
Define Your Quality Objectives
By taking key elements of your map and policy you can derive some objectives that you wish to achieve. These could be referred to as Critical Success Factors, such as financial performance, customer satisfaction, increased product/ service quality. These objectives need to be SMART and also communicated through the workforce to ensure that all employees are aware of what the company is trying to achieve.
Be sure to make all of the metrics are measurable and that you put in place methods to be able to conduct the measurement.
Identify Training Needs
One key thing to having a successful quality management system is to ensure that all of your staff are able to achieve the objectives you’ve laid out. If your staff are unable to achieve the objectives not only will your business suffer but so will the moral of the staff.
Measure & Monitor Your Performance
As with anything where you are trying to progress without monitoring and measurement it is impossible to tell how close you are to achieving your objectives or if an objective is too easy or hard to achieve. You’re unable to objectively analyse your progress. Therefore, you should build in methods to collect and analyse data on your progress.
Take Action to Improve Your Performance
This seems like a very obvious point to make but it still needs to be made. Once an area has been identified that requires improvement, improve it! Otherwise, not only will the whole process that you’ve been through be a waste of time but staff will become unmotivated and disconnected with the quality process and the quality of your services/ product will decrease.
