The beginning of every year sees a lot of New Year resolutions. Every individual is encouraged to reflect on the past year, on achievements and failures, and feed the outcomes into the new year. Indeed, the role of goal-setting in achieving success cannot be overemphasised.
History is a good reference when organisations plan toward future successes. It gives you the opportunity to leverage on strengths, to give wings to new initiatives that may have a similar directional thrust. At the same time, it gives you those critical lenses to adjust on actions that did not reap the expected outcome.
One important element of the ISO 9001 Standard is Management (Quality) Review. It wears the same colours as an annual self-assessment for any individual who wants to make progress into the future by looking at what transpired in the immediate past year.
Management Responsibility
The ISO 9001 Standard does not state exactly when a management review must be done, but it specifies that management reviews should be done at planned intervals. This means management can schedule the reviews monthly, quarterly or annually. The business’s nature should generally give guidance as to how to schedule these management reviews.
If the implementation of review outcomes is very critical to be implemented for resolving quality issues or to affect the quality management system significantly at shorter intervals, then it makes business sense to hold review meetings monthly or at most quarterly. Hence, Management reviews should be planned and carried out considering the changing business environment and in alignment with the organisation’s strategic direction, according to ISO 9001:2015.
Some businesses depend on annual management reviews, but the disadvantage is that there could be issues that should have been resolved far earlier regarding sustenance of the business when it came to quality. If the same attention given to tracking sales, cash flow, operating margins and the other financial indicators was be given to quality, businesses would be much healthier in totality.
To this end, therefore, businesses are encouraged to begin quality management reviews at the start of this year and maintain a consistent interval in such reviews to ensure their businesses thrive. The other challenge has got to do with the calibre of people who participate in management reviews. Again, there are several instances where quality reviews are relegated to line managers while senior management excuses themselves to carry out ‘strategic planning’.
It is not for nothing that the ISO Standard recommends management reviews to comprise top management, a quality management representative who chairs the meeting, line managers and compliance managers. It is also important to invite any other person who may give quality input into the review. The importance top management gives to quality and related issues in a business determines how much the company will thrive. Short-term goals of seeing profits go up may give the company a lifeline for a few years, but a long-term plan that embraces the right management of quality gives a business oxygen for life.
Management Review Inputs
There are four major inputs to management review prescribed by ISO 9001:2015, and each is very critical to the advancement of quality management in the organisation. Remember that according to the Standard, quality management includes all the activities organisations use to direct, control, and coordinate quality. These activities include formulating a quality policy and setting quality objectives. They also include quality planning, quality control, quality assurance, and quality improvement. Inputs to the management review will therefore encompass all elements of the definition above.
The first input will consider the status of actions from previous management reviews. This follows a typical review of actions in meetings. It is not prudent to keep adding actions at meetings without first considering previous actions and the status of those actions. Accountability is key to improvement. We laud achievements, but sound reason should form the basis of assessing why we miss targets.
Another input to management review changes in external and internal issues that are relevant to the quality management system. In the course of the year, certain changes such as reviews in formulation, processes, external supply chain, regulatory issues, and a lot more may emerge. These internal and external issues may have a direct impact on the quality management system; such that things should be done differently to accommodate them. The overall impact on the quality of products and services should be positive and ultimately satisfy customer requirements.
The third input to management review is information on performance of the quality management system, including trends and indicators for: Nonconformities and corrective actions; Monitoring and measurement of results; Audit results, Customer feedback; Supplier and external provider issues; and Process performance and product conformity. All these pieces of information come as a result of active participation by individuals within the organization, because they are mainly driven by records, trends and trend analysis, and a cycle of activities geared toward closing the loop on nonconformities.
Activities such as process audits, hygiene audits, supplier audits, consumer/customer complaints monitoring, to mention a few, are so crucial to bringing to the fore how well or otherwise an organisation is performing with respect to quality management. The last input to management reviews is opportunities for continual improvement. This is usually ascertained from overall performance of the system; what went well and could be improved, and what didn’t go well and must be worked on.
Management Review Outputs
At the end of the meeting, management should have a set of activities that should be executed to improve on the organisation’s quality management system. These are a set of actions and decisions that will seize the opportunity to bring about change toward uplifting quality in the organisation. These include decisions related to continual improvement opportunities.
The successes chalked up from resolving nonconformities must be sustained. There are instances when the process of resolving consumer complaints brings in its wake brilliant ideas for improving a product. In the end, the initial defect resulting in a complaint is resolved in addition to an improvement that gives the product or service a better functional outlook. Another output of such reviews is the opportunity to make changes in the quality management system. Such changes are due to the overall effect of inputs to the management review.
Conclusion
A quality management review is as essential as a financial review. The first step is to ensure you have a quality management system set up for your business. This will come with training of both top management and staff on how to run the system. Once this is done, it becomes easier to set up planned reviews of the system – and, of course, the benefits will follow.
After reading an article titled ‘How Jack Welch Runs GE’, I could understand how it was possible for Jack to make GE so powerful with the Six Sigma programme. He understood how a quality programme could help him turn his business around. Every organisation has the capacity to see a turnaround when focus on quality programmes becomes paramount.
Johnson Opoku-Boateng is the Founder & Lead Consultant, QA CONSULT (Consultants and Trainers in Quality Assurance, Health & Safety, Environmental Management systems, Manufacturing Excellence and Food Safety). He is also a consumer safety advocate and helps businesses with Regulatory Affairs. He can be reached on +233209996002, email: [email protected]; [email protected]
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