Quality Management Systems Essential to Many Industries and Services

Overview

Quality management systems (QMS) have been in place since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Early quality controls systems were used to manage and curtail defects in the products and eventually evolved to become a set of standards that controlled both the product and production processes.

As more workers and companies had to work together to produce acceptable results and production quantities grew, best practices were needed to ensure that quality goods were consistently produced. These best practices for controlling product and production processes were established and documented, and these turned into standard practices for quality management systems.

As manufacturing and production lines became more automated and accelerated in the 1950s and ‘60s, and production rates increased rapidly, quality became even more important because the potential of large quantities of sub-standard products entering the market became a reality. Producing quality products became more than having a quality control system in place to discover defects and make transactional corrective actions.

Quality control (QC) systems eventually gave way to quality assurance (QA) systems when manufacturers began to understand that quality products had to have quality built into the production process, and not just a QC system that discovered defects in an end item inspection and scrapped bad parts.

The premise of QA was based on the research and early work of American manufacturing thinkers like Joseph Juran and W. Edwards Deming. They based QA on methods like statistical process control (SPC), a method which employs statistical data and information to monitor and control the overall production process, thus ensuring that the production process will produce quality products. Key tools were developed to implement SPC like run charts (Pareto, Fishbone, etc.) and other control charts. Moreover, SPC led to the development of major process improvement systems like Lean Manufacturing and Six Sigma.

The post WWII Japanese manufacturers, especially car makers, who were eager to improve their product quality and compete with American and European manufacturers, recognized, and adopted the methods of Deming and Juran. Ironically, American manufacturers initially spurned the concepts of SPC and Continuous Process Improvement (CPI) developed by Deeming and Juran. The Japanese not only adopted the concepts of SPC, CPI, and Lean Manufacturing, but went on to expand these concepts into Kan-ban and Kaizen, methods used today across all types of manufacturing. Companies like Toyota introduced the Toyota Production System (TPS), which is based on the principles of Lean and CPI and focused on building greater efficiency into production processes. TPS is emulated across the automotive industry today, and its principles are used in other industries, such as aerospace and defense and heavy equipment industries.

The American response to the quality revolution in Japan gave birth to the concept of total quality management (TQM), a method for quality management that emphasized not only statistics but approaches that involve the entire manufacturing and enterprise organizations of the company. Eventually, independent standards bodies began producing quality standards (ISO-9001 and related standards) to assist in the creation and implementation of quality management systems. Today, the term QMS is preferred to TQM because of the multitude of unique quality systems that support a range of industries from discrete manufacturing, life sciences, consumer products, and energy.

The Evolution of the QMS Market to the Present

The QMS market focuses on modern QMS solutions that represent the evolution of quality management to its current portfolio of solutions. Today, a comprehensive portfolio of quality solutions would include audit management, compliance management, corrective and preventive actions (CAPA), defect tracking, document management, feedback tracking, incident management, nonconformance tracking, risk management, and supply chain quality. Some QMS providers focus on specific areas such as SPC, quality assurance assessment, and enterprise quality consulting.

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Keywords: Quality Management Systems, Quality Control, Quality Assurance, Total Quality Management (TQM), Statistical Process Control (SPC), Continuous Process Improvement (CPI), PLM, MES, ARC Advisory Group.