What is Quality Management System or QMS?

To establish what a ‘quality management system’ is, we have to break down the phrase. Firstly what is quality? Quality, we have seen, can be defined as: Degree to which a set of inherent characteristic fulfils a requirement. This, on its own, only gives some indication of what quality is. If you replace the word ‘requirement’ with the definition of that word it gives a much more meaningful definition, as follows: Degree to which a set of inherent characteristic fulfils a need or expectation that is stated, generally implied or obligatory. So what does this definition mean in practice? It means that the customer requests a product and/or service that is either stated (in a contract or order), implied and/or has obligatory (legal or regulatory) requirements. Quality is the ‘degree to which’ these requirements have been met.

Let’s look at what a management system is. In order to provide the products and/or services agreed with the customer the organization needs to have processes in place to enable the customers’ requirements to be met. The processes of an organization make up their systems and those systems have to be managed to ensure the organizations objectives are met.

The definition of a management system is: Set of interrelated or interacting elements of an organization to establish policies and objectives and processes to achieve those objectives. Therefore, a ‘Quality Management System’ is a system that enables the organization to achieve its objectives of meeting the customer’s stated, implied and/or obligatory requirements.

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