Quality management facts for kids
Quality management is all about making sure that a company, its products, or its services always work great. It helps businesses deliver what customers expect, every single time.
Think of it like this: if you buy a new video game, you expect it to work perfectly, right? Quality management is the system that makes sure it does! It focuses not just on the final product, but also on how that product is made. This way, companies can consistently create high-quality items.
Contents
How Quality Management Grew Over Time
Quality management might seem like a new idea, but people have cared about quality for a long time!
In ancient times, skilled craftspeople made things by hand. Customers could choose items that were made very well. These masters trained others, making sure their work was top-notch.
But then, things changed with mass production. This meant making many identical items quickly. In the US, Eli Whitney helped start this by making interchangeable parts for muskets. This led to assembly lines where many people worked together to build things.
Later, Frederick Winslow Taylor helped make factories more efficient. He's sometimes called the "father of scientific management." He focused on making work processes better and more standardized. Henry Ford also used these ideas in his car factories, making cars on assembly lines.
After World War II, Japan decided to focus heavily on improving quality to rebuild its economy. They asked experts like Walter A. Shewhart, W. Edwards Deming, and Joseph M. Juran for help.
Walter A. Shewhart created a way to control quality using statistics in 1924. This was a big step! W. Edwards Deming later used these methods in the US during World War II to make military products better.
Deming then shared his ideas in Japan starting in 1950. He taught them a lot about how to improve quality, productivity, and stay competitive. He had 14 important points for managers, including:
- Working together across different departments.
- Managers learning their roles and leading well.
- Helping people and machines do their best work.
- Always making the production system better.
- Encouraging everyone to learn and improve themselves.
- Making sure people aren't afraid to speak up or try new things.
In the 1950s and 60s, Japanese products were often seen as cheap. But because of their focus on quality, things changed. By the 1970s, Japanese products, like cars, became known for being very high quality.
Today, customers expect good quality. Companies know that offering better quality helps them stand out from competitors. Standards like ISO 9000 are now used worldwide to help companies manage quality.
New ideas in quality management include focusing on:
- Quality culture: making quality a part of everyone's mindset.
- Knowledge management: sharing what people know to improve things.
- Leadership: how leaders encourage high quality.
Even government groups and industries now see that a strong quality culture helps companies. Studies show that companies with a weak quality culture often have much higher costs.
Quality ideas have spread beyond factories. They are now used in services, sales, marketing, and customer service. Making customers happy is still key, but now companies also think about all the people involved, like employees and suppliers.
Main Ideas of Quality Management
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has a standard called ISO 9001:2015. It lists several important ideas that leaders can use to guide their organizations toward better performance.
Focusing on Customers
The main goal of quality management is to meet what customers need and try to go beyond what they expect.
When a company keeps its customers happy, it succeeds for a long time. Every time a customer interacts with the company, it's a chance to make them even happier. Understanding what customers need now and in the future helps a company succeed.
Good Leadership
Leaders at all levels set the goals and direction for the company. They create a place where everyone works together to reach quality goals.
Leaders must make the changes needed to improve quality. They also encourage everyone in the company to care about quality.
Involving Everyone
Having skilled and motivated people at all levels is key. This helps the company create and deliver great value.
To run a company well, it's important to involve everyone and respect them. When people feel valued and have the power to make decisions, they are more likely to help the company reach its quality goals.
Process Approach
You get better and more consistent results when you understand and manage activities as connected processes. These processes work together like a system.
A quality management system is made of many connected processes. Understanding how these processes work helps a company make its system and performance better.
Always Improving
Successful companies are always looking for ways to get better.
Improvement is important for a company to keep doing well. It helps them react to changes and find new opportunities.
Making Decisions with Evidence
Decisions based on looking at facts and information are more likely to lead to good results.
Making decisions can be tricky and often involves some uncertainty. It's important to understand why things happen and what might be the unexpected results. Using facts, evidence, and data helps make decisions more fair and reliable.
Managing Relationships
For long-term success, a company manages its relationships with all involved parties. This includes suppliers and retailers.
Other groups can affect how well a company performs. A company is more likely to succeed if it manages its relationships with everyone involved. This includes suppliers and partners.
Some Challenges with Quality Management
Not everyone agrees that quality management is perfect. Some experts, like Bettina Warzecha, say that ideas like "zero defects" (meaning no mistakes at all) are like modern myths. She thinks that trying to control everything perfectly can be hard. She also believes that focusing too much on processes might ignore how complex managing a company really is. Sometimes, she says, the problems from quality management can be bigger than the benefits.
Ways to Improve Quality
There are many ways to improve quality. These methods help make products, processes, and even people better. Here are a few:
- ISO 9001: This is a well-known system that helps organizations show they can consistently provide good products and services.
- Kaizen: This is a Japanese word meaning "change for the better." It's about making small, continuous improvements all the time.
- Six Sigma: This method uses statistics to find and fix problems, aiming for very few mistakes.
- PDCA: This stands for Plan, Do, Check, Act. It's a cycle for controlling and improving quality. You plan a change, try it, check the results, and then act on what you learned.
- Quality circle: This is when a group of employees meets regularly to solve problems and improve their work.
- TQM: This is a way of managing that makes everyone in the company aware of quality in all their work.
Companies need to choose the right improvement methods for them. What works for one company might not work for another.
It's really important to think about the "people factors" and the company's culture. Any change takes time to get used to. It's often easier to make small improvements (like Kaizen) than huge changes. Kaizen was a big reason for Japan's strong economy.
However, big changes might be needed if a company is in a crisis and needs to survive. Good quality improvement plans consider all these things.
Quality Standards
ISO Standards
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is a group of experts from 165 countries. They work together to create voluntary international standards for businesses and industries.
ISO created its first Quality Management System (QMS) standards in 1987. These were the ISO 9000 series. They have been updated several times since then. The most recent major update was in 2015.
The ISO 9001 standard helps companies manage their processes and systems. It doesn't approve the product itself. Instead, it makes sure the company and its customers agree on what the product or service needs to be. Then, the company manages its processes to meet those needs.
ISO 9001 can be used by any organization, no matter its type or size. However, ISO also has special standards for specific industries. For example:
- ISO 13485 is for companies that design and make medical devices.
- ISO 22000 is for the food industry, covering food safety.
- TS 16949 is specifically for the automotive industry.
Quality Management Software
Many companies now use special software to help them manage quality. This "Quality Management Software" helps them keep track of things like:
- Fixing problems and preventing them from happening again.
- Making sure they follow rules and pass audits.
- Managing risks.
- Analyzing data to control processes.
- Handling customer complaints.
This software helps different parts of a company communicate and work together better. It centralizes all the quality information, giving a clear picture of how products and processes are doing.
Important Quality Terms
- Quality Improvement: This is when you purposely change a process to make sure it works better and more reliably.
- Quality Control: This is the ongoing work to keep a process working correctly so it consistently produces the desired result.
- Quality Assurance: These are the planned actions taken to make sure a product or service will meet all the requirements.
See also
In Spanish: Gestión de la calidad para niños
- Quality audit
- Sales process engineering
- Systems thinking - Applications
- Health care
- Expediting
- Test management
- Eight dimensions of quality
- ADRI approach
- Software quality
- Software quality assurance
