Quality Management: An Introduction

1098 Words3 Pages

Quality systems are important in any industry and working environment. This report looks at a case study of a Maclean Ltd, a new business and its journey to achieving B.S.E.N ISO 9001 status. The company is a small firm about 80 employees, that doesn’t have any quality accreditation as of yet.

It is important to have proof to back up your abilities, whether you are a heating engineer working on a gas boiler (Gas safe register certification) or a large organisation producing baked goods, certification is important so your business can flourish and so the customer has confidence in your ability to do the work to a satisfactory level.

Quality management in a business is essential, it ensures the day to day running of the company is seamless, and it ensures the continuous high quality output from the business.
ISO 9001 is certification for a quality managed system. If a company has ISO 9001 certification then anyone who buys their products or works with said company knows that there are systems in place throughout the whole company to ensure a high quality consistent output. The key word there is consistent. A quality management system needs to ensure consistency in the finished product, so the customer is confident that the product is going to be fit for purpose and not going to fail. This needs to happen every time. To ensure consistency various tests are done before during and after the manufacturing stage, so we have pre inspection, testing the components that go into the product, batch testing, testing the first or a sample of the product from the batch, patrol inspection, where the site is patrolled and samples taken at random and then final inspection where the product is tested before it is shipped.

As the managing d...

... middle of paper ...

...’t working as well as we had hoped so we had to go back and improve it. We did expect this so we used it to our advantage to learn from where we were going wrong.
At the year mark we hired an ISO consultant to test us before we applied for the real thing, at this point we failed. But the feedback we received from the consultant was invaluable. We were confident that we could get our ISO9001 accreditation soon. So using the feedback from the consultant, the management made a big push to get it done within a year. The staff were very motivated at this point because of the trust and open communication we have built up during this process, and we managed to gain our accreditation at the two year mark. The organisation that we used to certify our business is the BSI group. They tested our business and then awarded us our ISO9001 accreditation based on those results.

Open Document