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The performance of your business depends on many factors, but none of them are as important as the quality of the products you offer. While seeking profit is the primary objective of any venture, the only way to become financially successful is to ensure customers are satisfied with your services or products. Therefore, quality management should be a priority for every business that wants to achieve sustained success. This concept simply means ensuring that your business operations can contribute to delivering top-notch services and products, resulting in employee and customer satisfaction. The aim is to seek excellence when executing tasks by considering factors like reliability, performance, durability, service, and compliance.
Businesses all around the world have adopted the ISO 9001 standard to continuously monitor, manage and enhance their services and products’ quality, and they have seen excellent benefits, including increased employee morale, enhanced customer retention, and improved revenues, to name just a few. At the foundation of the ISO 9001 standard lie seven essential principles of quality management that companies must keep in mind in their quest for increased profitability. We will discuss them in detail below, so keep reading to understand these principles and how you can apply them.
Customer focus
What’s the reason why you do what you do in your business? If your answer to this question isn’t “ to meet customer’s expectations”, you’re not doing things right. At the end of the day, your efforts won’t matter if customers don’t feel fulfilled with the products you offer. Sometimes, company owners tend to forget that customers are the pillar that keeps their business afloat, and if they want to achieve outstanding results, they should prioritize understanding customers’ needs and producing appropriate services and products after gaining valuable insights from the data they collect.
Some ways to identify needs include evaluating customer support call logs and past reviews, and surveying or interviewing customers to gather information on the solutions they are seeking from your brand. You should keep in mind that every interaction with the customer is an opportunity to build trust and value, and as you develop a customer-centric approach, you will achieve an excellent business reputation and successfully expand your customer base, ultimately resulting in increased revenue – which is your main objective.
Strong leadership
Robust leadership can unite employees and help them concentrate their efforts on achieving quality goals within the company. Simply put, company owners boost quality management by creating an environment where employees can thrive—in other words, they lead by example by adopting an attitude that aligns with the company’s culture and the values that employees should emulate.
Quality management leadership is achievable when company leaders aim for high quality that can set their products and services apart in a competitive environment. In practice, this means addressing concerns about their services or products whenever they arise and always looking for areas of improvement.
People engagement
The next principle is people engagement, which simply refers to engaging and empowering your team members to deliver quality. When employees feel like their role matters in the outcome of your business, they are more likely to be motivated to provide quality work, and ultimately, this is key to achieving the quality objectives within your organization.
People engagement is also about providing employee training to improve their skills and ensure they are up to date with the latest tech developments. This can result in improved performance, quality improvement, and, ultimately, customer satisfaction.
Process approach
This principle ensures that your QMS is consistent. It refers to identifying and understanding what resources and activities can enhance performance and quality and then including them in the operational process to prevent unhappy customers, stressed employees, wastage, and enhanced costs and instead ensure steady business growth.
To improve business processes, you must begin by deciding which process you want to improve. Once you do this, you can start investigating recurring problems ( such as what’s causing delays and what is frustrating customers or employees) and then eliminate the issues you’ve identified. To achieve this goal, you must list necessary resources and acquire them, and afterward, you can start changing existing processes – this can mean hiring new employees or buying new software.
Focus on improvement
Do you know what keeps you competitive in the market? Continuous improvement. When achieving your ISO 9001 certification with 9001 Simplified, you will learn that focusing on this aspect is imperative because no matter how outstanding your product is, if you don’t constantly evaluate and improve it, someone else will likely come up with a product that will take the place of yours.
One way to practice constant improvement is to implement small changes regularly. This long-term approach will drive incredible results, and it’s also easy to implement as it doesn’t require you to make a drastic change right away. Another idea is to implement the lean technique, which involves eliminating processes that don’t enhance your company’s value and replacing them with more efficient ones.
Evidence-based decision making
If you want to achieve great business results, you need to make decisions based on evaluating data. The decision-making process can often be complex because it involves different input and interpretation sources, which can be objective or subjective. However, with the right balance of experience, intuition, and resources, making the right decision becomes easier.
Evidence sources can include stakeholders ( such as board members, managers, and suppliers), organizational data (from clients, customers, and employees), professional expertise from consultants and business leaders, and scientific literature (in the form of academic journals).
Relationship management
Sustaining successful relationships is one of the secret ingredients of long-lasting business success. Keep in mind that it’s not just about the relationships with customers but also suppliers and investors – essentially anyone who has a stake in the performance of your business.
Relationship management is about maintaining effective communication with shareholders, respecting their time, and knowing when to send an email or schedule an in-person meeting. Of course, it’s also essential to meet their expectations as much as possible because this is key to ensuring repeat business.
The bottom line
While all these principles are essential for quality management, their ranking will depend on your industry. It’s essential to become familiar with how these principles work and implement them into your QMS because this will set your company up for success by strengthening your goods and services and ensuring they meet excellence standards that fulfill customers’ needs.
