FREE online courses on Quality Improvement - Principles of Quality Improvement

 

Quality improvement process is based on the following principles:

 

Customer satisfaction

 

The quality of an organization's products, services and other outputs is determined by the satisfaction of the customers who use them and results from the effectiveness and efficiency of the processes that create and support them.

 

Process improvement

 

Quality improvement is achieved by improving processes. Every activity or item of work in an organization comprises of one or more processes. Quality improvement is a continuous activity, aiming forever higher process effectiveness and efficiency.

 

Opportunities for improvement

 

Quality improvement efforts should be directed towards constantly seeking opportunities for improvement.  Improvement opportunities are discovered by measuring the performance of products, services, processes, systems and customer's satisfaction. Any non-conformance, customer complaint or cause of dissatisfaction should be treated as a golden opportunity for improvement.

 

Pro-active approach

 

Quality improvement is a pro-active action rather than waiting for a problem to reveal opportunities. Correcting the process outputs reduces or eliminates a problem that has occurred.  Preventive and pro active actions eliminate or reduce the causes of a problem and hence eliminate or reduce any future occurrence.  Thus, preventive and pro-active actions improve the processes of an organization and are critical to quality improvement.

 

Continuous activity

 

Quality improvement is a continuous activity. It has to be established as a well-organized continuous system in an organization. To retain and expand market share through customer satisfaction, quality of products, services and processes have to be continuously improved to match with or better than the best.