Part 6 – How to achieve continual improvement of your QMS
It is important to look at the QMS regularly to make sure it does what you need it to do for your organisation. If you measure, analyse and evaluate processes within the organisation you will have a good idea of what works well and what could be improved.
First identify what in your organisation needs to be measured, how it is to be done, how it will be analysed and evaluated, and when. Remember to keep documents as evidence. This could be things like looking customer satisfaction surveys that you send out to people you have completed work for. The feedback you get from your customers may give you some ideas of how to improve your services, or your product if you have one. You can look at how your organisation engages with customers and how well your current processes assess the customers’ needs and expectations. This will identify if there is any room for improvement. If you keep records and documents of this, it makes it easy to look back and see what works best for your organisation.
You could make a list of all the things your organisation does, and identify what documents need to be kept, and where and how this is done. You can think about how you can measure the effectiveness of the processes you have in place. How well do they achieve what they are supposed to achieve?
It is important to analyse and evaluate the information gathered from the monitoring and measuring activities. You can use the results to evaluate,
- Conformity of products/services
- Customer satisfaction
- The performance and effectiveness of the QMS
- Whether planning has been successfully implemented
- The effectiveness of the actions taken for risks and opportunities
- External provider’s performance
- The need to improve the QMS.
If you’re interested in learning a bit more about the standard and how it can fit into your organisation, check out the free ISO 9001 Awareness course provided by our colleagues over at Lorators.
Or if you think you’re ready to find out more about implementing a Quality Management System to the requirements of ISO 9001, our experienced consultants are ready to help.
Find the rest of the Blog Series Here –
