Quality Assurance Certification: 12 Questions you should Prepare

Quality Management is a method of overseeing all the activities and tasks essential for maintaining a desired level of excellence. It includes a quality policy, planning, quality control, and improvement. Sometimes, it is defined as Total Quality Management or TQM. Usually, quality management highlights on long-term goals with which the short-term initiatives should be initiated.

Total Quality Management is a business approach that nurtures the idea that long-term success or goal of an organization comes out of customer satisfaction. Quality management needs the stakeholders to work together to improve the processes, products, services, and the culture of the organization itself.

In this article, we will be discussing twelve questions that your top management would face during the audit held for gaining Quality Assurance Certification. Before going to the questions, we will give you a brief overview of Quality Management.

Origin of Quality Management

Quality management is an intuitive process. At the same time, it was introduced as a revolutionary approach. From the 1920s, the trade world became dependent on the statistics and statistical business theory. Anyone would be surprised to know that the first recorded control chart took place in 1924. With this development, businesses started building on the statistical theory and ended up collectively making the process of statistical process control (SPC). However, it was not successfully established in the business management system until the 1950s.

Benefits of QMS

Quality Management System establishes a framework for how a business deals with its key functions and operations. This approach is beneficial for every business, regardless of its accountability and industry. With this system, you can begin on the right foot. How? Simply by ensuring the business processes meet the identified standards clarifying the business objectives. This is also important for avoiding the business blunders that can fall heavier on the business.

Listed below are major benefits of the Quality Management System:

• Ensures greater consistency in the activities associated with the offerings (be it a product or a service)
• Reduces mistakes that may lead a business to a huge amount of expenses
• Increases efficiency and improves the use of time and resources
• Enhances customer satisfaction
• Promote the business most effectively
• Opens up new market sectors and territories
• Escalates the rate of employee engagement
• Maintains consistency in quality
• Maintains quality to ensure the continuous improvement
• Makes the brand internationally an nationally recognized
• Establishes the credibility

These benefits are enough to make one think about how to achieve ISO certification for quality management. In order to gain the certification, every organization should clear an audit held by a neutral certification body. In the next section, we are going to discuss the top twelve questions that the top management of an organization may face during the final audit.

12 Vital Questions on QMS

Since Quality Assurance or ISO 9001 standard makes an aspiring organization undertake a long journey to the certification, before appearing for the final audit, it is important for the top management to prepare a couple of questions frequently asked during the audit. Listed below are twelve frequently asked questions on the Quality Management System:

1. Does your quality policy outline a framework for developing and evaluating the quality objectives (Clause 5.3c)

2. Can you measure the quality objectives of your organization? If yes, do you measure them frequently? (Clause 5.4.1)

3. Have you made your quality objectives cascaded through the organization? Have you aligned them from top to bottom? (Clause 5.4.1)

4. Are your business processes identified and described? If yes, how do they communicate with each other?

5. Have you set out acceptable requirements for the offered product or service? (Clause 4.1 a &b)

6. Have you developed effective processes for interacting with your workforce? (Clause 5.5.3)

7. Do you evaluate your organization’s performance for gaining the Quality Assurance certification? (Clause 5.6.1)

8. Does this evaluation address all of the information- the audit results, consumer feedback, process performance, product and service conformity, state of corrective actions, the status of preventive actions, modifications, and improvement scopes? (Clause 5.6.2)

9. Do actions come out of the evaluation that you undertake? (Clause 5.6.3)

10. Have you identified the necessary competence levels for your entire workforce that can affect your product or services? (Clause 6.2.2a)

11. Do you find any data that can help you identify any particular trends or characteristics that may cause a nonconformance? (Clause 8.4C)

12. Are you able to show how your organization is actually improving the quality and its overall performance? (Clause 8.5.1)

An organization should consider these questions before appearing for the final audit.