Senior management should review the quality management organization’s system at planned intervals, to ensure its suitability, adequacy and continued effectiveness. The review management system should include the evaluation of improvement opportunities and the need for changes in the quality management system, including the quality policy and quality objectives.
I don’t blame you for thinking that it must be a boring meeting, full of data that we don’t even know how to order. Now, in this post, I will try to summarize which would be the minimum points that we need to address so that the result of the review is satisfactory and effective.
It is important that as a quality manager you send a meeting request with the points of the day that must be addressed so that all the attendees convened to prepare the data that they must provide for their analysis. The data they must provide is called by the ISO standards as “input data” and are as follows:
Results of the audits:
Here you must not only provide the NC that were detected for analysis, but also the opportunities for improvement, observations, comments, etc. that the auditors could see in the report. I sometimes give more value to that data, especially when they are the external audit reports, since the auditors, due to their experience in the sector, can give you improvements to your system.
Customer feedback:
In this section, you must take into account the opinion of your customers. As a general rule, companies tend to collect the numerical data or score received in the surveys and do not assess the result of information that can be taken from these surveys. I recommend that you analyze the surveys, for example, which question is worse valued, which is the best, if there is a population of customers with lower values than the average, you can help with graphics to see it better … And especially if they have given you suggestions, complaints, recommendations, etc.… you should also take it into account.
Process performance and product compliance:
This section is what we are asking for is what data we have collected from the process and product control indicators. Review management software analyzes what has been its evolution if at any time the reference values have been exceeded, which has been done to restore those values if any indicator must be reformulated by new trends, otherwise what is not being useful to us. In this section you can go as far as you want, it is a very large drawer that I advise you to entertain yourself in it since doing a good analysis of the indicators can give us many good actions on our work system. Think we have been collecting data for something all year, so get all the juice you can.
The actions of revisions of the system by the previous management:
As in this report, we will record many (or that we should) conclusions, improvement actions, recommendations, objectives … We should also have done it in the previous one since it is necessary that a follow-up is carried out to check if the improvement actions have been executed and have really been improvement actions, or on the contrary, we have wasted time. Analyze the fulfillment of the objectives proposed in previous meetings.
Changes that may affect the system:
In this section, it is normal to put “there have been no changes….” Sure? In most cases it is often forgotten to analyze whether there have been legislative changes that affect our activity, or there have been changes in any process that we have not detected, or the organization chart has been expanded with the formulation of new jobs or vice versa, have been merged by reduction of departments, a review generation software has been implemented that has streamlined a process … I bet there has been some change.
Recommendations for improvement:
The origin of the recommendations may come from customers, suppliers, workers, markets, competition…. Trying to stop for a moment in this section, I consider it of value since it can help us a lot to determine what aspects of our company can improve. We have to know how to listen especially to our workers, who with the day to day sure know how to improve the work that affects them or listen to the markets since we depend on them.
