Why a Quality Management System is Essential for Customer Satisfaction
By Karen Weeks, Quality Assurance Manager
As a manager of quality assurance, I often get questions about our quality management system (QMS). Folks are interested to understand what it is, what it does and how it benefits both our company and our clients. At CPS, we have established an “ISO-like” quality management system, one that closely follows the standards of the ISO 9000 principles. Our QMS ensures that we can continually improve processes, which in turn, allows us to provide the best products we can for our customers.
What is a quality management system?
In a nutshell, a quality management system is a tool for achieving enhanced customer satisfaction. Our Quality Policy communicates a commitment to quality and customer satisfaction. We implement and document procedures needed to attain our goals and objectives outlined in this policy. Our QMS ensures that procedures are consistently implemented, that problems can be identified and corrected promptly, and that we can continually review and improve processes and products.
What are the benefits of a QMS?
Incorporating a quality management system guarantees our ability to monitor and enhance our clients’ satisfaction and to improve internally so that we can excel externally.
Why establish a QMS?
By creating and documenting processes (and how they are performed), a QMS helps to keep all employees on the same page, even if those employees change over time. Through an “approval and update” documentation process, a QMS manages process changes and the associated documents, forms and work instructions. A revision in a procedure automatically prompts a training event to occur, ensuring that all employees understand new protocols and expectations.
How can a QMS improve products?
We constantly monitor customers’ comments, complaints and compliments to help us improve processes and methods that will ultimately provide a more advanced product. A successful quality management system responds immediately to internal errors, corrects them, and then establishes an action methodology in order to prevent reoccurrence. Our corrective action process prompts an immediate investigation and any deviations from the established protocol are broken down to the root cause, contained and prevented in future processes.
For CPS products, our QMS helps us to achieve our goals of delivering error-free products on time and providing proactive service and innovative solutions that meet or exceed our customers’ expectations. If you have questions about quality management systems, please feel free to contact me.