Eight Quality Management Principles

1. Customer Focus

Organizations depend on their customers and therefore have to understand their current and future customer needs, meet their customer's requirements and strive to exceed their customer's expectations.

2. Leadership

Leaders establish a unity of purpose and the direction of the organization. They need to create and maintain an internal environment in which people can become fully involved in achieving the organization's objectives.

3. People Involvement

People at all levels are the essence of an organization. Their full involvement creates opportunities for their abilities to be used for the organization's benefit.

4. Process Approach

A desired result is achieved more efficiently when activities and related resources are managed as a process.

5. Systems Approach to Management

Identifying, understanding and managing interrelated processes as a system define the organization's effectiveness at achieving its objectives.

6. Continual Improvement

Continuous overall performance improvement is the objective of a successful long-term organization.

7. Factual Approach to Decision-making

Effective decisions are based on solid information and objective data analysis.

8. Mutually Beneficial Supplier Relationship

An organization and its suppliers are interdependent and a mutually beneficial relationship enhances the ability of both to create value.

Next: What are the ISO 9000:2000 Key Changes?