Management Review – A Must For Organizations

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The beginning of every year sees a lot of New Year resolutions. Every individual is encouraged to reflect on the past year; on achievements and failures and feed the outcomes into the new year. Indeed, the role of goal setting in achieving success cannot be overemphasized. History is a good reference when organizations plan towards future successes. It gives you the opportunity to leverage on strengths, to give wings to new initiatives that may have a similar directional thrust. At the same time, it gives you those critical lenses to adjust on actions that did not reap the expected outcome. One important element of the ISO 9001 Standard is Management (Quality) Review. It wears the same colours of an annual self-assessment of any individual who would want to make progress into the future by looking at what transpired in the immediate past year.

Management Responsibility

The ISO 9001 Standard does not state exactly when a management review must be done but it specifies that, management review should be done at planned intervals. This means management can schedule the reviews monthly, quarterly, or annually. The nature of the business should generally give guidance as to how to schedule these management reviews. If implementation of review outcomes is very critical to be implemented to resolve quality issues or affect the quality management system significantly at shorter intervals, then it makes business sense to hold review meetings monthly or at most quarterly. Hence Management review shall be planned and carried out, considering the changing business environment and in alignment with the strategic direction of the organization according to ISO 9001:2015. Some businesses depend on annual management reviews, but the disadvantage is that there could be issues that should have been resolved far earlier regarding the sustenance of the business when it came to quality. If the same attention given to the tracking of sales, cash flow, operating margins and the other financial indicators would be given to quality, businesses would be much healthier in totality. To this end therefore, businesses are encouraged to begin quality management reviews at the start of this year and maintain a consistent interval in such reviews to ensure their businesses thrive.

The other challenge has gotten to do with the caliber of people that participate in management reviews. Again, there are several instances where quality reviews are relegated to line managers whilst senior management excuse themselves to “strategic planning”. It is not for nothing that the ISO Standard recommends management review to comprise of top management, a quality management representative who chairs the meeting, line managers and compliance managers. It is also important to invite any other person who may give quality input into the review. The importance top management gives to quality and related issues in a business determines how far the company will thrive. Short term goals of seeing profits go up may give a company a lifeline for a few years, but a long-term plan that embraces the right management of quality gives a business oxygen for life.

Management Review Inputs

There are four major inputs to management review prescribed by ISO 9001:2015 and each is very critical to the advancement of quality management in the organization. Remember that according to the Standard, quality management includes all the activities that organizations use to direct, control, and coordinate quality. These activities include formulating a quality policy and setting quality objectives. They also include quality planning, quality control, quality assurance, and quality improvement. The inputs to the management review will therefore encompass all the elements of the definition above.

The first input will consider the status of actions from previous management reviews. This follows a typical review of actions in meetings. It is not prudent to keep adding actions at meetings without first considering previous actions and the status of those actions. Accountability is key to improvement. We laud achievements but sound reason should form the basis why we miss targets. Another input to management review is changes in external and internal issues that are relevant to the quality management system. In the course of the year, certain changes such as reviews in formulation, processes, external supply chain, regulatory issues, and a lot more may emerge.

These internal and external issues may have a direct impact on the quality management system such that, things should be done differently to accommodate them. The overall impact on quality of products and services should be positive and ultimately satisfy customer requirements. The third input to management review is information on the performance of the quality management system, including trends and indicators for: Nonconformities and corrective actions; Monitoring and measurement of results; Audit results, Customer feedback; Supplier and external provider issues; and Process performance and product conformity. All these pieces of information come as a result of active participation of individuals within the organization because these are mainly driven by records, trends and trend analysis and a cycle of activities geared towards closing the loop on nonconformities. Activities such as process audits, hygiene audits, supplier audits, consumer/customer complaints monitoring, just to mention a few are so crucial to bringing to the fore how well or otherwise an organization is performing with respect to quality management. The last input to management review is opportunities for continual improvement. This is usually ascertained from the overall performance of the system; what went well and could be improved and what didn’t go well and must be worked on.

Management Reviews Output

At the end of the meeting, management should have a set of activities that should be executed to improve on the quality management system of the organization. These are a set of actions and decisions that would seize the opportunity to bring about change towards the upward lift of quality in the organization. These include decisions related to continual improvement opportunities. The successes chalked from resolving nonconformities must be sustained. There are instances where the process of resolving consumer complaints bring in its wake brilliant ideas of improving a product. In the end, the initial defect resulting in the complaint is resolved in addition to an improvement that gives the product or service a better functional outlook. Another output of such review is the opportunity to make changes to the quality management system. Such changes are due to the overall effect of the inputs to the management review.

Conclusion

A quality management review is as essential as a financial review. The first step is to ensure you have a quality management system set up for your business. This will come with training of both top management and staff on how to run the system. Once done, it becomes easier to set up planned reviews of the system and of course the benefits shall follow. In an article titled ‘How Jack Welch Runs GE’, I could understand how it was possible for Jack to make GE so powerful with the Six Sigma programme. He understood how a quality programme could help him turn his business around. Every organization has the capacity to see a turnaround when focus on quality programmes become paramount.
Johnson Opoku-Boateng is the Chief Executive & Lead Consultant, QA CONSULT (Consultants and Trainers in Quality Assurance, Health & Safety, Environmental Management systems, Manufacturing Excellence and Food Safety). He is also a consumer safety advocate and helps businesses with regulatory affairs. He can be reached on +233209996002, email: johnson@qaconsultgh.com.
BY: Johnson Opoku-Boateng

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