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.
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.
The ISO 9000 family of quality management systems (QMS) is a set of standards that helps organizations ensure they meet customer and other stakeholder needs within statutory and regulatory requirements related to a product or service. ISO 9000 deals with the fundamentals of QMS, including the seven quality management principles that underlie the family of standards. ISO 9001 deals with the requirements that organizations wishing to meet the standard must fulfill.
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.
Six Sigma (6σ) is a set of techniques and tools for process improvement. It was introduced by American engineer Bill Smith while working at Motorola in 1986.
The American Society for Quality (ASQ), formerly the American Society for Quality Control (ASQC), is a society of quality professionals, with nearly 80,000 members.
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.
ISO/IEC 17025General requirements for the competence of testing and calibration laboratories is the main ISO/IEC standard used by testing and calibration laboratories. In most countries, ISO/IEC 17025 is the standard for which most labs must hold accreditation in order to be deemed technically competent. In many cases, suppliers and regulatory authorities will not accept test or calibration results from a lab that is not accredited. Originally known as ISO/IEC Guide 25, ISO/IEC 17025 was initially issued by ISO/IEC in 1999. There are many commonalities with the ISO 9000 standard, but ISO/IEC 17025 is more specific in requirements for competence and applies directly to those organizations that produce testing and calibration results and is based on somewhat more technical principles. Laboratories use ISO/IEC 17025 to implement a quality system aimed at improving their ability to consistently produce valid results. It is also the basis for accreditation from an accreditation body.
The Canada Green Building Council (CaGBC) was created in 2003 to further the expansion of green building in Canada. Prior to the formation of the Council, Canada had participated in the United States Green Building Council (USGBC) through British Columbia's membership in the USGBC's Cascadia Chapter.
A continual improvement process, also often called a continuous improvement process, is an ongoing effort to improve products, services, or processes. These efforts can seek "incremental" improvement over time or "breakthrough" improvement all at once. Delivery processes are constantly evaluated and improved in the light of their efficiency, effectiveness and flexibility.
The Association for Talent Development (ATD), formerly American Society for Training & Development (ASTD), is a non-profit association serving those who develop talent in the workplace.
Aviva Canada Inc. is a Canadian property and casualty insurance company and a wholly owned subsidiary of the UK-based Aviva plc. It provides home, personal, automobile, recreational vehicle, group and business insurance to more than three million customers.
Subir Chowdhury is the author of 15 books and noted for his work in quality and management. He is currently the chairman and CEO of ASI Consulting Group, LLC, in Bingham Farms, Michigan.
Airports Council International (ACI) is an organization of airport authorities aimed at unifying industry practices for airport standards. Established in 1991, its headquarters are based in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, and its members operate nearly 2000 airports.
The International Society for Performance Improvement (ISPI) is a non-profit association for performance improvement professionals dedicated to improving individual, organizational, and societal functioning, productivity, and accomplishment in the workplace.
The Canada Awards for Excellence are the national quality awards of Canada. They are administered by Excellence Canada, a not-for-profit organization on behalf of the Governor General of Canada. Industry Canada established the awards in 1984 as the Canadian Business Excellence Awards. The National Quality Institute (NQI) was spun off as a separate, self-sustaining entity to administer the awards in 1992 and became Excellence Canada in 2011. While originally intended for profitmaking Canadian firms, the awards are now open to government agencies and not-for-profit organizations.
Debashis Sarkar is an Indian author, columnist and management consultant. He is the author of 11 books, including Building a Lean Service Enterprise – Reflections of a Lean Management Practitioner (2016), How Can I Help You – 5 Mistakes to Avoid in Customer Service (2013), Lessons in Lean Management (2012), Lean for Service Organizations and Offices–Holistic Approach for Achieving Operational Excellence (2008), 5S for Service Organizations and Offices–A Lean Look at Improvement (2006) and Lessons in Six Sigma (2004). He is noted for his work in Lean management and Operational excellence. Sarkar is an American Society for Quality (ASQ) Fellow. In recognition of his book, Lessons in Lean Management (2012), he was awarded the ASQ Crosby Medal in 2014. For his contribution to the field of quality, he also received the first D.L. Shah Quality Champion Platinum Award from Quality Council of India for the year 2017–2018. He has been credited for conceptualizing the DEB-LOREX Model.
Thomas Pyzdek is an American author and management consultant. He is best known for being an advocate of operational excellence and is an author of several books, hundreds of articles and papers on those topics.
Jianjun "Jan" Shi is a Chinese-born American engineer and the Carolyn J. Stewart Chair and Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. He also works at the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He was elected as a member into the National Academy of Engineering in 2018 for the "development of data fusion-based quality methods and their implementation in multistage manufacturing systems".
