Accommodation & Hospitality Services

STAFF BRIEFING – No 15

ISO 9001 - Quality Management

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What is Quality?

Quality management is an organisation-wide approach to understanding what customers need and continuously providing for these needs within budget, on time and with the minimum impact to society, environment etc.

In short it is the act of overseeing all activities and tasks needed to maintain a desired level of excellence, no matter what the product or service that your organisation delivers.

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Why Manage Quality?The effective management of quality not only creates value for an organisation and its stakeholders but also manages its exposure to and can make the difference between

And

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Customer focus - Delivering customer value while anticipating the future and new markets (Customer service, planning and marketing)

Leadership and business results - Providing vision and direction, gaining commitment and achieving collective results (strong leadership)

People and organisational culture - Delivering maximum value through development and involvement of individuals working in a productive organisational culture (positive culture for staff)

Systems thinking - Managing interrelated processes with an integrated approach (enabling everybody to work together)

Business process management - Delivering results through business processes to increase efficiency (Working faster, leaner and more efficiently)

Fact-based decision making - Ensuring good decision making by using accurate data and facts

Continual improvement - Making performance improvement a perpetual objective

Suppliers and partners - Maintaining mutually beneficial relationships to enable value creation

Quality - the fundamentals

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• The quality policy is:• A formal statement from management linked to business & marketing plan and customer needs.

Quality Management Policy It should be:• Understood and followed at all levels and by all employees. • Each employee has measurable objectives.• Decisions made about the quality system based on recorded data.• Regularly audited and evaluated.And ensure:• The business determines customer requirements.• The business communicates with customers about product information, inquiries, contracts,

orders, feedback, and complaints.• When developing new products, the business plans the stages of development, with appropriate

testing at each stage.• The business regularly reviews performance through internal audits and meetings. • The business determines whether the quality system is working and what improvements can be

made. It has a documented procedure for internal audits.• The business deals with past problems and potential problems. It keeps records of these activities

and the resulting decisions, and monitors their effectiveness.• The business has documented procedures for dealing with actual and potential non-conformances.

ISO 9001: Summary in informal language

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That’s all very good but what really does it have to do with me? I’m only…

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An important concept in quality control is listening to the customer. Although this task seems pretty simple (can't you just ask?!), you may find that your customers don't know exactly what they need, or they can't articulate their needs. The customer typically has three desires:

•They want a quality product/service.•They want it fast.•They want it cheap.

Of course, in the real world, consumers seldom get all three, so you need to identify what's most important to your customers, and you need to make sure you satisfy those needs.

You have several ways to hear your customer:

•You can ask…(how?)•You can borrow good ideas from your competitors. Don't be afraid to use good ideas, no matter where you find them.•You can use a good customer relationship management (CRM) system, which is a handy tool for gathering and analysing data about customers.

Listening to your customers

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The old management saying "You can't manage what you can't measure" rings especially true in quality control. A good measurement system helps you to know where you've been and where you're going. Customers typically require that you measure certain attributes of your product or service against their specifications.

Determine what to measure, how to measure it, and when to measure it.

Employee training is critical to ensure that everyone involved in your process measures the same specifications in the same way. You also need to collect data in a usable format so that you can analyse it to determine the effectiveness of your quality process. The effectiveness of your quality process is directly related to the quality of your data collection and analysis process. If you don't have good data, you can't make good decisions.

Measuring your quality

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The most common way to analyse the data you collect is to use statistics. Statistics serve many purposes within quality control:

•Statistics allow you to determine which processes or parts of processes are causing your company the most problems (by using the 80/20 rule — 80% of your problems are caused by 20% of what you do).•You can use statistics for sampling so that you don't have to test 100% of the items you make.•Statistics can help you spot relationships between the values you measure — even if the relationships aren't obvious. They also allow you to identify small variations in your process that can lead to big problems if you don't correct them.

Evaluating your quality

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NOTES/QUESTIONS

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