- a) The ability to consistently provide products and services that meet customer and applicable statutory and regulatory requirements;
- b) Facilitating opportunities to enhance customer satisfaction;
- c) Addressing risks and opportunities associated with its context and objectives;
- d) The ability to demonstrate conformity to specified quality management system requirements.
The quality management system requirements are complementary to requirements for products and services. This system employs the process approach, which incorporates the Plan- DO-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle and risk- based thinking.
The process approach enables an organization to plan its processes and their interactions. The PDCA cycle enable an organization to ensure that its processes are adequately resourced and managed, and that opportunities for improvement are determined and acted on.
Risk-based thinking enables an organization to determine the factors that could cause its processes and its quality management system to deviate from the planned results, to put in place preventive controls to minimize negative effects and to make maximum use of opportunities as they arise.
Consistently meeting requirements and addressing future needs and expectations poses a challenge for organizations in an increasingly dynamic and complex environment. To achieve this objective, the organization might find it necessary to adopt various forms of improvement in addition to correction and continual improvement, such as breakthrough change, innovation and re-organization.
Quality management principles
The quality management principles are:
- Customer focus;
- Leadership;
- Engagement of people;
- Process approach;
- Improvement;
- Evidence-based decision making;
- Relationship management.
This international standard (ISO 9001:2015) promotes the adoption of a process approach when developing, implementing and improving the effectiveness of a quality management system, to enhance customer satisfaction by meeting customer requirements.
Understanding and managing interrelated processes as a system contributes to the organization s effectiveness and efficiency in achieving its intended results. This approach enables the organization to control the interrelationships and inter dependencies among the processes of the system, so that the overall performance of the organization can be enhanced.