Editing Quality management system (section)

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A '''quality management system''' ('''QMS''') is a collection of [[business process]]es focused on consistently meeting customer requirements and enhancing their satisfaction. It is aligned with an organization's purpose and strategic direction ([[ISO 9000#Contents of ISO 9001:2015|ISO 9001:2015]]).<ref>{{Cite web |date=2021-09-01 |title=ISO 9001:2015 |url=https://www.iso.org/standard/62085.html |access-date=2023-07-08 |website=ISO |language=en}}</ref> It is expressed as the organizational goals and aspirations, policies, processes, documented information, and resources needed to implement and maintain it. Early [[Quality (business)|quality]] [[quality management|management]] systems emphasized predictable outcomes of an industrial product production line, using simple statistics and random sampling.  By the 20th century, labor inputs were typically the most costly inputs in most industrialized societies, so focus shifted to team cooperation and dynamics, especially the early signaling of problems via a [[continual improvement]] cycle.  In the 21st century, QMS has tended to converge with [[sustainability]] and [[transparency (behavior)|transparency]] initiatives, as both investor and customer satisfaction and perceived quality are increasingly tied to these factors.  Of QMS regimes, the [[ISO 9000]] family of standards is probably the most widely implemented worldwide – the [[ISO 19011]] [[audit]] regime applies to both and deals with quality and sustainability and their integration.

Other QMS, e.g. [[Natural Step]], focus on [[sustainability]] issues and assume that other quality problems will be reduced as result of the systematic thinking, transparency, documentation and diagnostic discipline.

The term "Quality Management System" and the initialism "QMS" were invented in 1991 by Ken Croucher, a British management consultant working on designing and implementing a generic model of a QMS within the IT industry.