Building an ISO 9000 QMS is about Effective Communications

Do your quality personnel speak the language of business?  Do business people speak the language of quality?  I read an interesting blog post a while back that raised this question.

The confusion highlights a core problem with ISO 9000 implementation—communication.  An effective quality implementation is really about effectively communicating with customers, suppliers, employees, and management to indentify, meet, or exceed requirements.  Quality, sales, marketing, design, manufacturing, accounting, and management must all communicate using the same language.

It starts with collecting the customer’s requirements from the customer (i.e., voice of the customer), communicating customer requirements to design/development, and design/development communicating what they think the customer wants back to the customer for confirmation through verification and validation.  Then design/development communicates specifications to purchasing, manufacturing engineering, and quality/testing to ensure it is made as designed.

Quality must communicate to management via internal audits, management reviews, and quality objectives that the system is capable of consistently reproducing the product or process.  The company communicates its consistency to its stakeholders via its quality policy, ISO certification, and management commitment.

Management communicates its quality commitment by allocating budget for continuous improvement using corrective action and preventive action, training, and infrastructure expenditures.  Waste is produced as a result of poor communication between one or more of the groups or departments within an organization.  Total up the cost of all of your nonconformities, defects, and deviations from plan and you get the cost of poor communications.

When we talk about effective communication, we are talking about a real two-way exchange of information.  Both the sender and receiver must be actively engaged and providing feedback for it to be effective.  Implement an effective quality management communication system and the savings will be huge.

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Originally published in 2009 by Bizmanualz, Inc. under the title Building an ISO 9000 QMS is about Effective Communications. All rights reserved. Reproduction permitted with attribution only. www.bizmanualz.com