Quality management

What is quality management?

Quality management strives to continuously improve a product, production process, service or organization. For example, a service or organisation has to do quality management in order to achieve certain quality standards, for example ISO, NEN et cetera.

If producers and service providers want to achieve these quality standards, they need to implement quality management in the organisation. Whether an organisation meets a quality standard is often objectively tested by inspection bodies (such as Lloyds or DNV-GL) through internal audits. In the case of a successful test (audit), a quality certificate is often rewarded. This certicate allows the use of quality labels and is officially awarded by an inspection authority.

The tougher quality standards (linked to laws and regulations) are used in products and services where human lives can be affected, such as food, medication but also means of transport and buildings. And there are also generic quality standards that are relevant to various kinds of organizations. For example, standards for information management andsecurity.

Quality management instructions

Do you want the quality in your organization to be guaranteed? Then your employees and managers will have to act and check according to specific instructions. These instructions, procedures and/or policy documents are often documented in so-called quality documents. These are divided into files, processed into training materials and made available to employees.

Is management of quality files required?

The management of a file containing quality documents is a continuous process. This can have four reasons:

1. In our economy, new technologies/methodologies are constantly being launched. At the same time calamities are being assessed. This ensures improvements in quality standards and thus adjustments to your quality file, procedures, instructions and trainings.
2. As an organization, you can have new product lines or services tested for quality.
3. It may be that your clients or suppliers are going to require that you, in order to maintain or establish the relationship, have to meet a quality standard.
4. Finally, the current quality standard may be outdated and needs to be re-tested.

Good version management supports quality management

“How do I know that a quality standard/instruction is being carried out? Has the latest change in the standard been read and understood by every employee and manager? How much time do we spend implementing this standard and may this be at the expense of other things? How can I be sure that everyone sees the latest version of this instruction and doesn’t work with the old version?” are just a few quality management questions you might ask.

We understand that. In some cases, it takes a lot of time to tightly manage the release management of quality documents. The need to share these documents creates a lot of email traffic and copies in personal folder structures on PCs, laptops and/or mobile devices. The new versions of quality documents ensure that this ‘sharing’ is continuously going on. It is difficult to see and ensure that every employee involved reads and understands everything on time. Especially at larger organizations, spread over branches in various countries.

Automated quality files with xtendis software

Expansion offers its standard Document Management System Xtendis for efficient quality management. With Xtendis, as a quality specialist, you can create or modify documents in Xtendis with templates thanks to the integration with Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) in combination with the powerful Xtendis Version Control.

If you want to ask a fellow quality specialist for an opinion after drafting or editing a document, you can do so via useful features in the Xtendis FLOW module. If you decide to publish documents internally, you can distribute protected document links to employees from Xtendis and ask them for action.

Decide whether or not employees can store the document locally. You’re sure everyone sees the latest version, not the old one. You have control and access to what happens to documents. The entire process can be logged ‘underwater’ by Xtendis so that during an external audit it is visible that you have acted in accordance with the rules.

With DMS Xtendis two birds with one stone: efficient document storage and a guaranteed quality standard

The guarantee of norms and standards is often accompanied by trainings, processes and work instructions. However, it rarely includes how employees deal with (digital) documents. With the use of Xtendis, you can simplify document storage while ensuring that the method of storage, search, and distribution is up to the norm or standard. For example, you can enforce, uniformize and record actions. These things are not possible in a standard Windows environment nor in standard ERP systems. Xtendis is used in this way by various companies (small and large).

Do you want to know what Xtendis can do for your organization? Contact us via the form below, we will be happy to give you personal advice.