Quality Management System Concept & Examples | What is QMS? – Video & Lesson Transcript | Study.com

Kevin M. Toole has taught college level courses for over twenty-two years. He has a Bachelor’s degree in Business Management from Stevenson University, Maryland and a Master’s degree in Curriculum and Instructional Design from Western Governors University, Utah. He has developed curriculum for both residential and online courses for over five years and holds a position in both academic and business management as a college-level education manager for the past twelve years.

What Is a Quality Management System (QMS)?

Quality management definition is the process of managing all activities, personnel, and work tasks that are needed to achieve and maintain a certain level of quality and excellence. Quality management encompasses all aspects of the organization including creating quality-based policies, developing quality planning measures, conducting quality control, and constantly striving for quality improvement overall.

What is QMS? QMS stands for quality management systems, the definition of which is the totality of organizational processes that are focused on producing an output that meets defined specifications. Quality management systems can be ‘home-grown’, meaning they are developed and designed completely within an organization, or they can be adaptations of existing quality management models or frameworks. Quality management systems help coordinate all organizational activities to meet their desired levels of excellence on a continuous basis.

Quality Management Components

Quality management systems have several important quality management components. Even though different industries and organizations have different quality management systems based on what their product or services are, all have key quality management components that will be the same. The following are those key quality management components.

• Quality is defined: The desired level of quality excellence must be defined. A quality management system is designed to ensure a certain level of output quality, so the quality output level must be clearly defined to establish the minimum level of excellence expected.
• Built-in feedback loop: A quality management system must have a way to constantly collect feedback, analyze the feedback, and then respond to the feedback. The feedback loop will continue as it continues to gather more feedback and repeats the process. This built-in feedback loop was developed by Dr. William Edwards Deming in the 1950s and was called the Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle or, PDSA cycle. Dr. Deming developed this process as a systematic way to achieve constant quality improvement.
• Quality is a theme: Quality management must be the overall theme of the organization, not just something that applies to a single service aspect, manufacturing division, or production process. All employees of the organization, from the top management to various levels of employees, must understand the role they play in achieving and maintaining the level of quality desired.

Quality Improvement

Quality improvement is a component of quality management based upon the quality of the output of the organization or business. For example, the use of solely customer satisfaction ratings would not be a useful measurement of product or service quality as the satisfactory ratings can be influenced by other factors not specifically associated with the output, which would be the product or service. A better indicator of quality improvement measurement would be how close to the level of quality and excellence were all the products manufactured in a fiscal year. For example, on the production of a household broom, if the quality metric was all brooms must be exactly four feet long, all weigh exactly 2 pounds, and all have exactly 12 inches of bristles, how many met these quality indicators and how many did not? This would be a good quality improvement check as it can be precisely measured, the process analyzed, and quality improvement measures can be taken to improve the quality.

Quality Management Benefits

Quality management systems offer several quality management benefits that can help an organization or business, including the stakeholders. The following are some of those benefits.