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. It is expressed as the organizational goals and aspirations, policies, processes, documented information, and resources needed to implement and maintain it. Early quality management systems emphasized predictable outcomes of an industrial product production line, using simple statistics and random sampling. By the 20th century, labor inputs were typically the most costly inputs in most industrialized societies, so focus shifted to team cooperation and dynamics, especially the early signaling of problems via a continual improvement cycle. 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. Of QMS regimes, the ISO 9000 family of standards is probably the most widely implemented worldwide – the ISO 19011 audit regime applies to both and deals with quality and sustainability and their integration.
The European Quality Award is now referred to as the EFQM Excellence Award.
Total quality management (TQM) consists of organization-wide efforts to "install and make permanent climate where employees continuously improve their ability to provide on demand products and services that customers will find of particular value." "Total" emphasizes that departments in addition to production are obligated to improve their operations; "management" emphasizes that executives are obligated to actively manage quality through funding, training, staffing, and goal setting. While there is no widely agreed-upon approach, TQM efforts typically draw heavily on the previously developed tools and techniques of quality control. TQM enjoyed widespread attention during the late 1980s and early 1990s before being overshadowed by ISO 9000, Lean manufacturing, and Six Sigma.
ISO 14000 is a family of standards by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) related to environmental management that exists to help organizations (a) minimize how their operations negatively affect the environment ; (b) comply with applicable laws, regulations, and other environmentally oriented requirements; and (c) continually improve in the above.
The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award recognizes U.S. organizations in the business, health care, education, and nonprofit sectors for performance excellence. The Baldrige Award is the highest formal recognition of the performance excellence of both public and private U.S. organizations given by the President of the United States. It is administered by the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program, which is based at and managed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce.
Kaizen is a concept referring to business activities that continuously improve all functions and involve all employees from the CEO to the assembly line workers. Kaizen also applies to processes, such as purchasing and logistics, that cross organizational boundaries into the supply chain. It has been applied in healthcare, psychotherapy, life coaching, government, manufacturing, and banking.
Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) is a collection of best-practices for the development of new products and processes. It is sometimes deployed as an engineering design process or business process management method. DFSS originated at General Electric to build on the success they had with traditional Six Sigma; but instead of process improvement, DFSS was made to target new product development. It is used in many industries, like finance, marketing, basic engineering, process industries, waste management, and electronics. It is based on the use of statistical tools like linear regression and enables empirical research similar to that performed in other fields, such as social science. While the tools and order used in Six Sigma require a process to be in place and functioning, DFSS has the objective of determining the needs of customers and the business, and driving those needs into the product solution so created. It is used for product or process design in contrast with process improvement. Measurement is the most important part of most Six Sigma or DFSS tools, but whereas in Six Sigma measurements are made from an existing process, DFSS focuses on gaining a deep insight into customer needs and using these to inform every design decision and trade-off.
Quality management ensures that an organization, product or service consistently functions well. It has four main components: quality planning, quality assurance, quality control and quality improvement. Quality management is focused not only on product and service quality, but also on the means to achieve it. Quality management, therefore, uses quality assurance and control of processes as well as products to achieve more consistent quality. Quality control is also part of quality management. What a customer wants and is willing to pay for it, determines quality. It is a written or unwritten commitment to a known or unknown consumer in the market. Quality can be defined as how well the product performs its intended function.
Operational excellence is a mindset that embraces certain principles and tools to create a culture of excellence within an organization. Operational excellence means every employee can see, deliver, and improve the flow of value to a customer.
The European Practice Assessment is a pan-European development for quality management in primary health care. The scaffolding is a set of indicators, that EPA instrument enables general practitioners to compare and to improve the organisation and management of their practices. It is based on an extended review of the international literature on assessment models for primary care, with special attention to the Dutch model of practice visits.
The Security Industry Authority (SIA) is the statutory organisation responsible for regulating the private security industry in the UK. Established as a non-departmental public body in 2003, the SIA reports to the Home Secretary under the terms of the Private Security Industry Act 2001 (c. 12).
The EFQM Excellence Award now known as The EFQM Global Award is a quality award that recognises European businesses with "excellent and sustainable results" across all areas of The EFQM Model. It was established in October 1991 as the European Quality Award by the European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM). The assessment process is one of the most robust of any award, with a team of independent assessors spending an average of 500 hours per applicant reviewing documentation and conducting interviews on-site.
The Method for an Integrated Knowledge Environment (MIKE2.0) is an open source delivery methodology for enterprise information management consultants. MIKE2.0 was released in December 2006 by BearingPoint's Information Management team under the leadership of Robert Hillard. The project used Creative Commons Attribution License and was implemented by Sean McClowry. The project is now run by the MIKE2.0 Governance Association, a non-profit organisation based in Switzerland, with BearingPoint and Deloitte as the founding members. In March 2013 a book Information Development Using MIKE2.0 was published promoting it.
A safety management system (SMS) is a management system designed to manage occupational safety and health risks in the workplace. If the system contains elements elements of management of longer-term health impacts and occupational disease, it may be referred to as a safety and health management system (SHMS) or health and safety management system.
The British Quality Foundation (BQF) is an independent, not-for-profit corporate membership organisation and was founded by the Department for Trade and Industry and UK business leaders in 1993.
Small-scale project management is the specific type of project management of small-scale projects. These projects are characterised by factors such as short duration; low person hours; small team; size of the budget and the balance between the time committed to delivering the project itself and the time committed to managing the project. They are otherwise unique, time delineated and require the delivery of a final output in the same way as large-scale projects.
The Common Assessment Framework (CAF) is the common European quality management instrument for the public sector. It is a free tool to assist public sector organisations to improve their performance. The CAF helps the organisations to perform a self-assessment with the involvement of all staff, to develop an improvement plan based on the results of the self-assessment and to implement the improvement actions. The model "is based on the premise that excellent results in organisational performance, citizens/customers, people and society are achieved through leadership driving strategy and planning, people, partnerships and resources, and processes. It looks at the organisation from different angles at the same time, the holistic approach of organisation performance analysis." On 7 September 2011, 2382 public sector organisations from 43 different nationalities or from the EU institutions were registered as CAF users in the CAF Database.
The European Foundation for Quality in eLearning (EFQUEL) was a not-for-profit organisation which was legally established on June 30, 2005, and is based in Brussels, Belgium. It was a worldwide membership network with over 120 member organisations including universities, corporations and national agencies. The purpose of the foundation was to create a European community of users and experts to share experiences of eLearning. Two of the main initiatives of the foundation were the "UNIQUe" accreditation for Quality in e-Learning and the annual EFQUEL Forum.
The European Quality in Social Services (EQUASS) is an integrated sector-specific quality certification system that certifies compliance of social services with European quality principles and criteria. EQUASS aims to enhance the social sector by engaging service providers in quality and continuous improvement and by guaranteeing service users quality of services throughout Europe.
DGQ is a membership organization, which was founded in 1952 by Technical Statistics Committee under Committee for Economical Production. Since 1972, DGQ is legally independent under its present name.
