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5.1 Management Commitment
Quality starts at the top rather than the lower
levels of a company. Top management must perform the duties show in
clause 5.1.
Top management
determines the vision, communicates it to the rest of the company.
They must provide the resources for the system and they are charged
with checking up on the vision from time to time. Top management may
be one person in smaller companies or the board of directors or
corporate officers in large companies. For most of use, top
management is The Boss.
5.2 Customer Focus
Customers are the reason the lights are on, the doors are open for
business and the bills get paid. Top management is to focus their
attention on making your customers happy.
5.3 Quality Policy
The company should adopt a
policy it can live with and not one that promises things that are
not possible. What is said in the quality policy must be put into
play. Everyone in the company has to know what the policy is and
what it means. You don’t need to memorize it word for word. Just
have a good understanding of what it is and what it means.
Top management
must also review the policy at each management review to determine
if it needs to be updated.
5.4
Planning
5.4.1 Quality Objectives
The
objectives are the things we measure to determine if everything is
going okay. The quality policy doesn’t have to contain the quality
objectives, just be the framework for them. The objectives tell us
the goals and purposes of what we are doing.
5.4.2 Quality Management
System Planning
We have
to plan out what we are going to do before we do it. No shooting
from the hip. We have to make sure we are complying with the items
in clause 4.1.
5.5
Responsibility, Authority and Communication
5.5.1 Responsibility and
authority
Have you ever wondered just exactly what your job is? It’s very
difficult to do a great job when no one has told you exactly what it
is you’re suppose to do. This clause of the standard requires that
job responsibilities and authorities be written down. The word
‘define’ means write it down.
5.5.2 Management
Representative
The
company must assign one person to be responsible overall for the
QMS. This person may be called the management representative,
quality manager or whatever their regular job title is. You must
know who this person is in your company.
5.5.3 Internal Communications
Top management must make sure that they communicate with everyone in
the company about the ISO 9001 system.
5.6
Management Review
Now that we
have defined our quality policy, planned the implementation of the
QMS, identified and defined the responsibilities and authorities to
reach our goals, we need to periodically check and measure our
progress and continually improve. This is called management review.
Top management gets together and reviews all the processes to see
how they are working.
More information on these pages
Clause 4
Clause 6
Clause 7
Clause 8
Online
ISO 9000 Introduction Course
Auditor Training:
Classroom
Online
Auditor Training
Courseware
What
is a Quality Management System?
What is ISO 9000?
What is ISO 9004?
What is ISO 19011?
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