QUALITY MANAGEMENT SYSTEM (QMS ISO 9001:2008)

1. The concept of quality as we think of it now first emerged from the Industrial Revolution. Quality, as a profession and the managerial process associated with the quality function, was introduced during the second-half of the 20th century, and has evolved since then. Over this period, few other disciplines have seen as many changes as the quality profession. The quality profession grew from simple control, to engineering, to systems engineering. Quality control activities were predominant in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. The 1970s were an era of quality engineering and the 1990s saw quality systems as an emerging field. Quality has achieved status as a recognized profession.
   
   
2. A quality management system (QMS) is a collection of business processes focused on achieving quality policy and quality objectives — i.e. what your customer wants and needs. It is expressed as the organizational structure, policies, procedures, processes and resources needed to implement quality management. Early systems emphasized predictable outcomes of an industrial product production line, using simple statistics and random sampling. By the 20th century, labour inputs were typically the most costly inputs in most industrialized societies, so focus shifted to team cooperation and dynamics, especially the early signaling of problems via a continuous improvement cycle. In the 21st century, QMS has tended to converge with sustainability and transparency initiatives, as both investor and customer satisfaction and perceived quality is increasingly tied to these factors. QMS also focus on sustainability issues and assume that other quality problems will be reduced as result of the systematic thinking, transparency, documentation and diagnostic discipline that sustainability focus implies.
   
   
3. A QMS process is an element of an organizational QMS. The ISO9001:2000 standard requires organizations seeking compliance or certification to define the processes which form the QMS and the sequence and interaction of these processes.
   
   
4. QMS helps organizations need to demonstrate its ability to consistently provide product that meets customer and applicable statutory and regulatory requirements and aims to enhance customer satisfaction through the effective application of the system, including processes for continual improvement of the system and the assurance of conformity to customer and applicable statutory and regulatory requirements.