Quality assurance: essential for sound planning
Quality assurance, often referred to as quality management, represents a method for planning and implementing concrete measures within logistics. It basically refers to a system as a whole, certain processes or even products that are subjected to specific evaluation criteria. In the context of an audit, quality management can be divided into, for example, a product audit, a process audit or a so-called QM system audit.
Important: Quality assurance or quality management is based on the fact that all actions of a company follow the goal of ensuring quality. In this context, quality refers to conformity with the respective requirements and needs, e.g. with regard to the nature of products or the target values of workflows and processes.
From quality assurance to quality management system (QM system)
While quality assurance provides the theoretical framework, a QM system provides the concrete design. This system defines how quality management is structured and how processes are organized - they form the norm, so that deviations (positive and negative) can be determined in the form of concrete values. There are various quality management systems that are standardized according to international standards. One example of this would be DIN EN ISO 9000:2008, which is used worldwide as an industry-neutral standard.
The aim of quality management is to ensure work, process or product quality or to make processes more efficient. QM audits also reveal whether processes may need to be structured in a fundamentally different way. For example, when inefficient processes have a negative financial or organizational impact.
