Philosophies

Quality management adopts a number of management principles that can be used to guide organizations towards improved performance.

Learning Objective

Recognize how top management can improve quality performance

Key Points

There are eight primary quality management principles.
The principles are the basis of the ISO 9001:2008 quality management system standard.
One of the permanent quality objectives of an organization should be the continual improvement of its overall performance.

Terms

Quality Management
Process of ensuring that an organization or product is consistent. It can be considered to have four main components: quality planning, quality control, quality assurance, and quality improvement. Quality management is focused not only on product/service quality, but also the means to achieve it.
value
The degree of importance you give to something.
ISO 9001:2008
The ISO 9000 family of standards are related to quality management systems and designed to help organizations ensure that they meet the needs of customers and other stakeholders while meeting statutory and regulatory requirements related to the product.

Example

In the 1950s and 1960s, Japanese goods were synonymous with cheapness and low quality but over time, their quality initiatives began to be successful, with Japan achieving very high levels of quality in products from the 1970s onward. For example, Japanese cars regularly top the J.D. Power customer satisfaction ratings. In the 1980s, Deming was asked by Ford Motor Company to start a quality initiative after they realized that they were falling behind Japanese manufacturers. A number of highly successful quality initiatives have been invented by the Japanese (see for example, on this page: Genichi Taguchi, QFD, Toyota Production System. Many of the methods not only provide techniques but also have associated quality culture (i.e., people factors). These methods are now adopted by the same western countries that decades earlier derided Japanese methods.

Full Text

The Principles of Quality Management

Quality management adopts a number of management principles that can be used by top management to guide their organizations towards improved performance. The principles include:

Customer focus: Since the organizations depend on their customers, they should understand current and future customer needs, should meet customer requirements, and try to exceed the expectations of customers. An organization attains customer focus when all people in the organization know both the internal and external customers and also what customer requirements must be met to ensure that both the internal and external customers are satisfied.
Leadership: Leaders of an organization establish unity of purpose and direction of it. They should go for creation and maintenance of such an internal environment, in which people can become fully involved in achieving the organization's quality objective.
Involvement of people: People at all levels of an organization are the essence of it. Their complete involvement enables their abilities to be used for the benefit of the organization.
Process approach: The desired result can be achieved when activities and related resources are managed in an organization as process.
System approach to management: An organization's effectiveness and efficiency in achieving its quality objectives are contributed by identifying, understanding, and managing all interrelated processes as a system.
Continual improvement: One of the permanent quality objectives of an organization should be the continual improvement of its overall performance.
Factual approach to decision making: Effective decisions are always based on the data analysis and information.
Mutually beneficial supplier relationships: Since an organization and its suppliers are interdependent, therefore, a mutually beneficial relationship between them increases the ability of both to add value.

These eight principles form the basis for the quality management system standard ISO 9001:2008.

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