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Need for managing quality
Role of standard-setting bodies within quality managementISO
ISO is a non-governmental, independent, international organization that develops standards to ensure the quality, efficiency and safety of systems, products and services. Besides, ISO plays the role of developing and publishing international standards. The certification offered by ISO is essential because it shows that a certain organization has met all the quality and standardization requirements in its operations. ISO standards exist across various industries. They aim at establishing consistency within different industries. The ISO certifications contain separate criteria and standards, and they are numerically classified. This paper will give a deeper discussion of some of the ISO standards that focus on quality management.
According to Sun (2017, Pg. 6), all standards that fall under the ISO 9000 family refer to quality management. ISO 9001 is a standard for quality management and organizations that are ISO 9001 certified are said to have offerings that meet all the quality standards. This standard allows organizations and businesses to improve on efficiency and consumer satisfaction. Organizations that are ISO 9001 certified are required to follow all the quality management requirements. ISO 9001 is a generic standardization because it can be applied to all organizations regardless of their types and sizes. The sole aim of this standard is to ensure that quality is assured for all the parties that transact with the businesses with this certification.
ISO 9001:2008
This standard falls under the ISO 9000 family. ISO 9001:2008 is, therefore, a standard for quality management that is designed to help organizations make sure that they meet all the customers’ and stakeholders’ requirements. ISO 9001:2008 requires an organization to show its ability to provide products or services that will consistently meet the regulatory, statutory, and customers’ requirements without fail. It also aims at enhancing customer satisfaction by providing assurance that the certified organization will conform to the requirements of the customer and to the set regulatory and statutory requirements.
ISO 9000:2005
The above-named certification falls under the ISO 9000 family, which, as discussed earlier, refers to quality management. ISO 9000:2005 was published by the international organization for standards in 2005, and it describes the fundamentals of the systems of quality management.
ISO 9004:2009
ISO 9004:2009 is a standard that guides organizations towards supporting the achievements of sustained success using a quality management strategy. ISO 9004 focuses on promoting self-assessment, which helps organizations to identify their areas of weakness and strength and make the necessary improvements on them. The main focus of this standard is to help organizations that are certified with quality management to gain long-term benefits from the implementation of quality management systems (Sun, 2018, Pg. 7). This standard gives organizations the tools and guidelines that they require to attain their long-term success.
IS0 19011:2011
This standard offers auditing guidance to organizations. It guides organizations on how to manage auditing systems. The standard guides organization on how to manage an audit program, the auditing principles, conducting audits for the management system, and also how to evaluate the competence of the auditing process personnel. This standard can be applied to all businesses that require to conduct either an external or an internal audit of their management systems.
Quality management principles
According to Sun (2018, Pg. 3), the eight quality management principles, according to ISO 9001, are:
- Customer focus
Meeting and exceeding the requirements of the customers is the major focus of managing quality. In addition, via this principle, organizations achieve sustained long-term success by gaining the confidence and the loyalty of customers. According to ISO 9000:2005, this principle will help an organization increase its customer base, gain a positive reputation, increase its market share, and offer customer satisfaction.
- Leadership
This principle maintains that an organization’s leaders should create and maintain an environment where workers are able to be fully engaged in achieving the long-term goals of an organization. Based on this principle, leaders in an organization should create a harmony of purpose and engage the workers in an organization’s processes and strategies. Based on ISO 9000:2015, this will help to coordinate the processes of an organization better.
- Involvement of people
This principle states that an organization should empower, recognize, and engage every induvial at each level of the organization. This principle maintains that engaging people motivates people, thus making it easier for an organization to achieve its goals.
- Process approach
This principle states that an organization efficiently achieves more predictable and consistent results when its activities are managed interrelatedly. Since the quality management system consists of interrelated processes, optimizing the performance of an organization becomes easier.
- System approach to management
To attain sustained success, organizations should manage all its processes as a single articulate quality management system.
- Improvement
Organizations need to continuously improve the various levels of performance in order to adapt to both internal and external environment changes.
- Evidence-based decision making
According to this principle, organizations should make decisions based on information and data that have been analyzed and evaluated in order to arrive at the best decisions. Organizations should gather information from different sources and identify facts when making decisions. According to ISO 9000:2015, this will help make the decision-making process less complex.
- Managing relationships
Based on this principle, for an organization to succeed, it should ensure that they have strong and beneficial relationships with all its stakeholders. This will help the organization to manage quality as they will understand the expectations of all the involved parties.
Performance standards
Once an organization has measured the performance of a certain operation, it makes judgments of the performance. Deciding whether the performance was satisfactory or not requires the organization to compare its current performance to a performance standard (a performance threshold/expectation set by an organization) that it has set. The following are the performance standards that organizations can use to measure their performance.
- Historical standard
This performance standard compares the current performance to past performances. It judges whether or not an operation has improved its performance over time.
- Target performance standard
Target performance standards are randomly set to reflect specific performance levels. These types of performance standards need to be reasonable and appropriate. A perfect example of this type of performance standard is a budget that needs to be reviewed either quarterly or yearly.
- Competitor performance standards
These are performance standards in which the current performance is compared against that of either one or many competitors of the organization. This standard helps an organization to improve its strategic performance.
- Absolute performance standards
This is a standard where the targeted performance is based on a theoretical limit. For instance, in operation, an organization can target zero loss or nil defects on its offerings.
- Benchmarking
Role of benchmarking
As a strategic management tool, benchmarking is where an organization compares its performance with the performance of the best-in-class organizations within the industry. It allows a business to measure its productivity based on the best companies in the industry.
The role of benchmarking is to improve the performance of an organization. It helps identify strategies that can be used to improve the operations of an organization. Benchmarking also plays the role of increasing an organization’s learning rate. Through benchmarking, an organization gains new ideas and shares experience as well (Gilmour, 2018, Pg. 14). Besides, benchmarking helps an organization to identify improvement opportunities and put more effort into its strengths to gain a strategic advantage.
Benchmarking analysis and steps
Step 1: selecting the process and building support
The initial step involves selecting the business to benchmark in and gathering support from management in order to get the necessary resources needed for a successful benchmarking process.
Step 2: determine the current performance.
This step involves understanding the current level of performance for an organization before for easier comparison with the other organizations’ performance.
Step 3: identifying areas which need performance
This step helps an organization to select the appropriate benchmark partners based on the selected process that needs improvement.
Step 4: determine the performance gap.
This step involves an organization knowing the gap between its desired performance and its current performance.
Step 5: Create an action plan.
Creating an actionable plan involves describing the problems/areas that need improvement upon benchmarking and documenting all the targeted solutions.
Step 6: continuous improvement
This step involves an organization continuously participating in benchmarking for continuous performance improvement.
Methods and types of benchmarking
There are two main types of benchmarking. These are internal benchmarking and external benchmarking. While internal benchmarking involves comparing performance and practices between groups, individuals, or teams in an organization, external benchmarking involves comparing organizational performance with other organizations in the industry (Gilmour, 2018 Pg. 14).
Benchmarking can be done in different ways. Some of the methods of benchmarking include:
- Process benchmarking. This aims at learning how the organizations that perform best in the industry accomplice particular processes. It is done via site visits, interviews, or surveys.
- Strategic benchmarking. This method aims at identifying the strategies that have helped top-performing organizations to succeed in the industry.
- Performance metrics. These provide numerical standards against which processes are compared. Performance gaps are then identified, and then an action plan is initiated, which is later evaluated to determine its improvement.
- How lean practices, principles, and tools create customer value
Lean practices pay full attention to customers. Lean practices emphasize more on the idea of value (Bicheno, 2019, Pg. 9). Therefore, by focusing on the customers, lean practices help to create customer value by putting all efforts into meeting their expectations and demands.
The five principles of lean
- Defining value
Organizations are deemed to understand what value is in order to better understand what customers are looking for.
- Mapping the value stream
This lean principle requires that businesses should use the customers’ value as a guide towards identifying the activities that will lead to the desired customer value and eliminating those that will not.
- Creating flow
After eliminating unnecessary activities, this principle requires that the remaining activities should run seamlessly with no delays or interruptions.
- Create a pull
This involves creating products that will immediately serve the needs of the customers without any delays. Just in time, delivery is an example of a pull that can be established.
- Seek perfection
Once the four principles named above have been achieved, making lean a continuous initiative and part of the organizational culture will improve the customer value creation.
Lean practices
Lean practices help organizations to improve their efficiency and production by allowing them to maximize every resource used. According to Bicheno (2019, Pg. 9), the following are some of the most common lean tools:
Agile
This is an approach that is used to deliver value to customers faster and with fewer challenges. Agile allows an organization to deliver value by collaborating with customers to deliver value quickly via operating in iterations.
Kaizen
Kaizen refers to the concept of continuous improvement. It creates customer value by ensuring that the processes are continually improved to suit customer expectations.
JIT
Just in time, delivery creates customer value by ensuring that it delivers only what the customers need and when they need it.
TQM
Total quality management is the process of identifying, minimizing, and eliminating any errors during the manufacturing of products. It enhances customer value by ensuring that the products are manufactured to meet the quality expectations of the customers.
Lean tools
PESTEL analysis
This helps analyze the business environment of an organization. It creates value by understanding the needs of the customers and designing offerings that will meet those specific needs.
PDCA model
The (plan-do-check-act) model is a model that advocates for continuous improvements in the business processes.
Baldrige (MBNQA) model
This model allows a business to identify its strengths and weaknesses and prioritize the strengths that help the organization succeed.
EFQM business excellence model
This is a management framework that helps organizations attain success by analyzing their achievements towards transformation and help them identify the gaps that exist and the potential solutions.
Job costing and ABC
Activity-based costing (ABC) is a tool used to allocate costs to a company’s products and services. It is used as a planning and control tool. On the other hand, job costing is an approach used to track expenses that are incurred when producing certain goods and services.
Reference
Bicheno, J., and Holweg, M., 2019. The lean toolbox (Vol. 4). Buckingham: PICSIE books.
Gilmour, P., 2018. Benchmarking supply chain operations. Benchmarking for Quality Management & Technology.
Sun, H., 2018. Total quality management, ISO 9000 certification, and performance improvement. International Journal of Quality & Reliability Management.