A quality management system (QMS) is a collection of business processes focused on consistently meeting customer requirements and enhancing their satisfaction. It is aligned with an organization's purpose and strategic direction, and is expressed as organizational goals and aspirations, policies, processes, documented information, and resources needed to implement and maintain them. Early quality management systems emphasized predictable outcomes of the production line using simple statistics and random sampling. By the 20th century, since labor inputs were typically the most costly inputs in most industrialized societies, focus shifted to team cooperation and dynamics, especially the early signaling of problems via continual improvement cycles. In the 21st century, QMS has tended to converge with sustainability and transparency initiatives, as both investor and customer satisfaction and perceived quality are increasingly tied to these factors. The ISO 9000 family of standards is probably the most widely implemented QMS regimes; the ISO 19011 audit regime also applies to both and deals with quality and sustainability and their integration. Other QMS, e.g. the Natural Step framework, focus on sustainability issues and assume that other quality problems will be reduced as result of the systematic thinking, transparency, documentation and diagnostic discipline. The term "Quality Management System" and the initialism "QMS" were invented in 1991 by Ken Croucher, a British management consultant working on designing and implementing a generic model of a QMS within the IT industry.
History The concept of quality as used in QMS first emerged from the Industrial Revolution. Previously, goods had been made from start to finish by the same person or team of people, with handcrafting and tweaking the product to meet 'quality criteria'. Mass production brought huge teams of people together to work on specific stages of production where one person would not necessarily complete a product from start to finish. In the late 19th century pioneers such as Frederick Winslow Taylor and Henry Ford recognized the limitations of the methods being used in mass production at the time and the subsequent varying quality of output. Birland established Quality Departments to oversee the quality of production and rectifying of errors, and Ford emphasized standardization of design and component standards to ensure a standard product was produced. Management of quality was the responsibility of the Quality Department and was implemented by Inspection of product output to 'catch' defects. Application of statistical control came later as a result of World War production methods, advanced by W. Edwards Deming, a statistician, after whom the Deming Prize for quality is named. Joseph M. Juran, another worker in the field, focused on management, publishing a Quality Control Handbook in 1951. He also developed "Juran's trilogy", an approach to cross-functional management composed of three managerial processes: quality planning, quality control, and quality improvement. The quality profession grew from simple control to engineering, to systems engineering. Quality control activities were predominant in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. The 1970s were an era of quality engineering and the 1990s saw quality systems as an emerging field. Like medicine, accounting, and engineering, quality has achieved status as a recognized profession. There are many organizations that are striving to assess the methods and ways in which their overall productivity, the quality of their products and services and the required operations to achieve them are done.
Contents and standards Elements of QMS include quality objectives, a quality manual, organizational structure and responsibilities, data management, processes (including purchasing), product quality leading to customer satisfaction, continuous improvement including corrective and preventive action, quality instruments, document control, employee training and engagement, and supplier quality management. The International Organization for Standardization's ISO 9001:2015 series describes standards for a QMS addressing the principles and processes surrounding the design, development, and delivery of a general product or service. Organizations can participate in a continuing certification process to ISO 9001:2015 to demonstrate their compliance with the standard, which includes a requirement for continual (i.e. planned) improvement of the QMS, as well as more foundational QMS components such as failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA). The European Quality in Social Service (EQUASS) is a sector-specific quality system designed for the social services sector and addresses quality principles that are specific to service delivery to vulnerable groups, such as empowerment, rights, and person-centredness. The Alliance for Performance Excellence is a network of state and local organizations that use the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence at the grassroots level to improve the performance of local organizations and economies. browsers can find Alliance members in their state and get the latest news and events from the Baldrige community. ISO 9000:2005 provides information on the fundamentals and vocabulary used in quality management systems. ISO 9004:2009 provides guidance on a quality management approach for the sustained success of an organization. Neither of these standards can be used for certification purposes as they provide guidance, not requirements.
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