What is Quality Management and seven quality management principles?

What is Quality Management and what does it mean?

Quality Management are set of best management practices to ensure that an organization produces products or deliver services with a consistent desired quality level to meet or exceed the Customer requirements. 

Managing Organization and its processes for Quality is vital if the Organization has to meet or exceed the Customer requirements or meet or exceed its Organizational goals / objectives.

Quality management focuses on four main areas:

1. Quality Planning: Quality planning ensures setting measurable Quality objectives, planning resources and processes to meet the desired objectives
2. Quality Assurance: Quality assurance includes the set of procedures to provide confidence to the Customers that the requirements for quality will be met 
3. Quality Control: Quality control is the set of procedures that ensures that the quality requirements are fulfilled.
4. Quality Improvement: Quality improvement are set of activities to enhance the current level of quality achieved by the Organization. 

Quality Management includes the establishment of Quality Policy that serves as the Quality vision, Quality objectives that serves as Quality mission, and the processes 

Seven Quality Management principles as per ISO 9001:2015

The Seven Quality Management Principles according to ISO 9001:2015 standard are as follows:

1. Customer Focus
2. Leadership
3. Engage your people
4. Process approach
5. Improvement
6. Evidence based decision making
7. Relationship management

(Courtesy: ISO)

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What are Quality Costs? What are the 4 types of Quality Costs?

What are Quality Costs?

Quality costs or Cost of Quality (COQ) are the costs associated with the Quality related efforts by Organizational personnel. Every Organization puts a certain level of effort in maintaining the Quality level that it claims for its products and services or that meet the expectations of its Customers. These costs are called Quality Costs.

An American Quality Control expert called Armand V. Feigenbaum first introduced this concept of cost of Quality in the year 1956 in a Business Management article.

Till this concept was introduced, Financial personnel did not think that there can be costs associated in maintaining the Quality level in an Organization. It was an eye opener to understand that "Quality also costs".

What are the types of Quality Costs?

Armand Feigenbaum has identified the costs of Quality as shown in the figure below:

According to Feigenbaum, there are two major categories of Cost of Quality:

1. Costs of Conformance: Costs of Conformance are costs to ensure conformance of products and services by controlling them, and is sub-divided into: 
• Prevention Costs: These are costs that are incurred to prevent non-conformance from happening. Examples include Cost of training personnel on Quality requirements, Cost of planning for Quality, cost of implementing Statistical Quality Control techniques, development of Quality systems and costs associated with its sustenance, etc.
• Appraisal Costs: These are costs that are incurred to ensure the conformance through measurement and monitoring. Examples include audits, inspection, testing, calibration etc. Testing can be acceptance testing, field testing or testing of materials.
2. Costs of Non-conformance: Costs of Non-conformance are costs incurred in the event of failure of controls and is sub-divided into: 
• Internal Failure Costs: These are costs that are incurred because of failure of products and services and is observed before shipping the products to the Customer or before delivering services to the Customer. Examples include cost of producing defects, cost of scrapping, cost of rework, cost of repair, cost of re-design, cost of downtime, cost of time spent in sorting the scrap, etc.
• External Failure Costs: These are costs that are incurred because of failure of products and services and is observed after shipping the products to the Customer or after delivering services to the Customer. Examples include cost of complaints under warranty, cost of complaints after warranty period, cost of recall of the product, cost of returns, cost of loss of brand reputation, cost of penalties from Customers, cost of liability or lawsuit, etc.

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