Quality Assurance Guidelines For Improving Performance

Quality control guidelines are a written set of instructions that can help any business or organization achieve their target of quality and customer satisfaction. One such guideline is the international standard ISO 9004. The ISO 9001 standard of quality defines the requirements that an organizations quality management system needs to follow so that the organization can be certified. ISO 9004 gives quality assurance guidelines that complement ISO 9001 and helps the organization achieve performance improvements. Even though ISO 9004 is not meant for the certification purpose, many organizations use its guidelines provided in this standard for achieving continual improvement.

Any business organization that wants to go beyond ISO 9001-quality management systems should seriously look at the quality control guidelines as enumerated in ISO 9004 and they should strive to implement them to improve their quality and performance. ISO 9004 gives clause by clause linkage to ISO 9001 i.e. it expands upon the requirements of ISO 9001 clauses and adds requirements that help in improving the performance of the organization. Each clause is further supported by examples to make it easy to understand.

Here are the eight principles on which the quality control guidelines are based

• Customer focus – Everybody in the organization should understand the importance of customer focus and should work towards it. The customer means not only external customers but also internal customers. The organization should realize that they depend on customers and hence should do its best to meet and exceed customer requirements.
•  Process approach – The entire business is a series of steps that form a process. People should understand the linkages and importance of each step to the final objective. This will help in reducing the entire cycle time for the customers.
• Leadership - Unless leaders show commitment towards quality, the employees will not be motivated and hence the onus lies with the leadership. It is the responsibility of the leaders to give a clear vision of the targets and provide resources to achieve those targets. They should also inspire and motivate people by recognizing their achievements.
• Involvement of People – Everybody should be involved and should be aware of what is expected from him/her in order to achieve customer satisfaction. This gives them a sense of ownership and responsibility.
• Continual Improvement - This is different from continuous improvement in the sense that it expects the organization to achieve a quality level, maintain it consistently and then move up one level and so on. This helps the people in understanding the importance of continuous learning and also helps the organization in becoming more flexible.
• Systems approach - The management is expected to identify the interrelated processes as one system with each process being important. This helps in improving the efficiency and the effectiveness of the organization.
• Factual approach - The decision making should be based on facts. The available data should be analyzed and according to the results of analysis, the decision should be taken.
• Supplier relationship - It is important for management to realize the importance of a good supplier relationship. Both supplier and organization are mutually dependent and hence this relationship is very important for both.

These principles form the framework for quality assurance guidelines around which the management of organizations should work in order to improve their performance and quality delivery.

If you like this entry ; please visit our other Storage Mart blogs :
Storage Mart Secret Shopping Blog :
http://www.secretshoppingblog.com/

Tweet This Post 

Disclamer: This entry is intended to promote our partner StorageMart and some or all participants received compensation.

View admin's Profile      Subscribe via RSS