ISO 9001 Training

Understanding ISO 9001:2008
Requirements for Quality Management Systems

5.3 Quality Policy

ISO 9001 Training - Key Explanation Points and Tips:

Developing a QMS must be a strategic business decision and therefore top management must provide the necessary direction and leadership, starting with establishing the quality policy and objectives. Your quality policy provides top management’s vision on quality management for the organization. It provides the organization with focused direction, i.e. high level goals and objectives for quality management.

Your quality policy must be consistent with the scope of your QMS (see clause 1- scope) and other business, management and organizational strategies within the organization. Aggressive sales or marketing strategies must not be at the expense of quality management.

Clause 4.1.a - requires that you document your quality policy and clause 5.3.c requires that you specify your commitment to ‘meet requirements’ and ‘continually improve the effectiveness of your QMS’. Clause 1 specifies requirements for the scope of your QMS. Shouldn’t the wording in clause 1 be a good way to define your quality policy?

The wording of the quality policy should preferably specify what requirements are being complied with (customer, regulatory, ISO 9001, etc.). It must also clearly state your commitment to continually improve the effectiveness of the QMS.

Beyond that, you may state other complementary and important policies (business growth; product or manufacturing technology; workforce competence; business flexibility, etc.)

What you state in your quality policy must lead to establishing quality objectives, e.g. if you state in your quality policy that you will “meet customer requirements”, then from this, you might derive customer focused objectives for - product defects; customer complaints and returns; on time delivery, etc. Similarly, for the phrase -“meet ISO 9001 requirements”; from this you might derive process objectives for effectively using ISO 9001 requirements to manage, control and improve al of your QMS processes. Check out the process performance indicators suggested in our coverage of clause 4.2.3 and 4.2.4.

Stating that you will “continually improve the effectiveness of your QMS” in your quality policy - can lead to a number of objectives, as your QMS is comprised of many processes and you could have one or more objectives for each process.

Therefore, each statement in your quality policy may result in one or more quality objectives. These quality objectives do not need to be stated in your quality policy, but top management must clearly be involved in providing direction, establishing and reviewing these objectives.

Earlier we had covered processes for internal and external communication. Your internal communication process should cover how the quality policy is communicated throughout the organization. There are many ways of doing this. Personnel must understand the importance and impact of the quality policy on the work they do.

If you recall from 4.2.1 your QMS includes the quality policy and quality objectives. Therefore, these are controlled documents and must be controlled according to clause 4.2.3 control of documents. Your quality policy may be documented in your quality manual or as an independent document or both.

The quality policy is not written in stone. It must be reviewed periodically by top management, for significant changes in your organization, e.g. management, ownership, relocation, product, shift in customer base, etc. Such changes may result in changes to the quality policy. The establishment of the quality policy should be part of the business planning or QMS planning processes. A review of the quality policy for continuing suitability should be part of your management review process (see clause 5.6). As a quality document, the quality policy is also controlled by 4.2.3 control of documents.

In clause 8.5.1, we will examine how the quality policy can be used as a tool for continual improvement.