A quality management system (QMS) can be expressed as the organizational structure, procedures, processes and resources needed to implement quality management. Early systems emphasized predictable outcomes of an industrial product production line, using simple statistics and random sampling. By the 20th century, labour inputs were typically the most costly inputs in most industrialized societies, so focus shifted to team cooperation and dynamics, especially the early signalling of problems via a continuous 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 is increasingly tied to these factors. Of all 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.
Other QMS, e.g. Natural Step, focus on sustainability issues and assume that other quality problems will be reduced as result of the systematic thinking, transparency, documentation and diagnostic discipline that sustainability focus implies. See sustainability for more on this approach to quality management.
Read more about Quality Management System: Elements of A Quality Management System, Concept of Quality - Historical Background, Quality System For Medical Devices, Quality Management Organizations and Awards
Famous quotes containing the words quality, management and/or system:
“A quality is something capable of being completely embodied. A law never can be embodied in its character as a law except by determining a habit. A quality is how something may or might have been. A law is how an endless future must continue to be.”
—Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)
“Why not draft executive and management brains to prepare and produce the equipment the $21-a-month draftee must use and forget this dollar-a-year tommyrot? Would we send an army into the field under a dollar-a-year General who had to be home Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays?”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“Short of a wholesale reform of college athletics—a complete breakdown of the whole system that is now focused on money and power—the women’s programs are just as doomed as the men’s are to move further and further away from the academic mission of their colleges.... We have to decide if that’s the kind of success for women’s sports that we want.”
—Christine H. B. Grant, U.S. university athletic director. As quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education, p. A42 (May 12, 1993)