ISO 9001: Practical Tips on Measuring Quality Management System

Summary
If you have a QMS in place, you must measure its performance regularly to prepare your business for ISO 9001 audit. In this article, you will explore some practical tips on how to measure the performance of the QMS.

Most of the companies having a Quality Management System or QMS certification to ISO 9001:2015 Standard are bound to perform against a set of objectives and KPIs or Key Performance Indicators. These companies can easily show how they are maintaining continual improvement. Since the performance of the QMS plays a pivotal role in the implementation of the ISO 9001 standard, it is imperative to come up with innovative and effective ways of measuring the performance of the QMS. In this article, we will discuss why a company should pay attention to this measurement and how the measurement can be done in the best possible way.

Why Measurement is Required?

“The organisation shall evaluate the performance and the effectiveness of the quality management system”- 9001:2015 Standard, 9.1.1 Section

Though the requirement of measurement is not prescriptive, most of the companies prefer to establish a proven process of measurement to ensure the effectiveness of the system. Moreover, such measurement can help an organization ensure month-on-month improvement and value of money.

Tracking the performance will become easier for a business with a month-on-month measurement. This way, presenting all the records to demonstrate the continuous improvement will be less time-consuming for the top management during an audit.

For a successful measurement, you need to understand from where you should begin and what performance indicators you should set for the measurement. In the next section, we will be discussing how to determine the indicators against which an organization should measure the performance of the QMS.

How to find out which measurements fit the best?

Over the years, we have been seeing diverse opinions on how to measure the quality in the most effective way, especially when the manufacturing industry is concerned. However, performance assessment of QMS is no less important in the service industry. No matter what is the industry, every business should determine what the most important performance indicators are for them. Here, we are going to discuss a couple of important key performance indicator to measure the QMS performance while you are thinking about how to achieve ISO certification.

Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction should be at the core of the measurement process. The most suitable answer to the question “how the QMS is working” is lying in an analysis report of customer satisfaction. The organizations should prepare a questionnaire for the customers to assess their satisfaction against a specific target or objectives, which are relevant to the respective sector of the businesses. This strategy is useful for the call centers and other “one-to-one client –facing” businesses.

Defining Quality Measure

The organisations should employ a measurement trick for defining how the processes within the QMS are performing. For instance, a company can count on the measuring test “pass rates”. It will provide a key indicator of how the active processes are performing in the QMS. If a key part of the processes fails even before reaching the customers, the company can measure the performance of the QMS from this partial measurement test. In this context, it must be noted that the process of measuring test pass rates is not able to improve the QMS month over month. For such improvement, the businesses need to examine the key components of the processes.

Financial Performance

Apparently, a link between the success of the QMS and the financial performance may seem unbelievable, but it’s not! A customer dissatisfied with the quality of the offered products or services will never return to the business. As an outcome, the earnings will be lessening. Less earning, of course, will have a tremendous impact on the financial performance of the company. Therefore, by measuring the financial performance and finding the root causes of financial losses, a business can easily measure the performance of the QMS. This is one of the best ways of ensuring the QMS performance before the audit held for ISO 9001 certification.

Return Material Authorization Rates or RMA

Return Material Authorization Rates or RMA is a common measure for inspecting the performance of the QMS. By measuring this RMA, many businesses have recorded their successful execution of the QMS performance measurement.

Cost of Quality

Using the cost of “reworking” is also a good way of measuring the performance of the QMS. If the QMS is working as per the expectation, then the chances of reworking will be less. If the QMS fails to meet the expectation, the number of “rework” will be increasing. Hence, the businesses can easily measure the success of the QMS by counting on the numbers of the “reworks”

Apart from these, a company can set out many other key performance indicators specific to that particular sector.