Quality Manual is crucial document in a manufacturing organization. Every organization should create such manual to sustain in the process of standardization.
How much you know about the Quality Manual?
This question is important, because as a expert quality or industrial engineer you must understand the know-how of this documentation.
And typically when you trying to learn the QMS documentation then this is the base of all documents in the organization.
This complete article will help you to understand everything about the quality manual.
What is Quality Manual?
Do you know that there is a system in the manufacturing organization. This system plays important role in maintaining and helps to run the organization effectively. Such a system is called as a Quality Management System.
This QMS system is based on common industry standards such as ISO 9001:2015 and for Automotive industry it is IATF 16949:2016. But this standards are design to capture all type of industry applications and processes. Some criterial and requirements are not applicable for your organization.
Therefore here the role of Quality manual comes into picture.
The Quality Manual is the complete organization specific guidelines and standard, which mentioned all QMS system and processes requirement based on ISO / IATF standard.
It is the top level document of the company mentioning all processes and guidelines of organization. It is in the form of booklet or manual.
Why organization need Quality Manual?
Now it is clear that the manufacturing organization is run based on certain documents, quality policy and procedure. In future one of the documents or process not followed by the employee. Then there will be huge risk of failure or deviation in the system.
This may impacting your business. And no one have a idea about the lack of such documents.
Therefore the manufacturing organization must need a Quality manual. Which has all detailed guidelines and processes of how you can maintained your quality and run the organization processes smoothly.
It is also important in the context of standardization at the era of competitive market and customer satisfaction. It covers all your stakeholders and customer expectation in detailed manner.
How to write or create Quality Manual?
It is clear that the quality manual is somehow different for organization based on the scope of the industry type and product.
Therefore it is important to consider organizational goal, scope and customer expectation align with the QMS standard to create the quality policy.
Creation of quality manual take time and resources. It is one time activity and will only modified in future based on revised requirement and methods.
It is always recommend that create a quality manual by own organization team. Hiring consultant will give you the template and modified the template according to your use.
But this is also ok to save the organization time and resource of you don’t have the competent team to create it.
The steps includes in creating the quality manual are,
- Understand the QMS standards, scope of organization, goals, SIPOC and policies.
- Create a compelling draft of the quality manual considering all relevant clauses from the QMS standards and procedures.
- Plan a review and moderation meetings with the stakeholders to finalize the draft.
- Take the final approval from the top management or higher authorities within the organization.
- Make a control copy of the quality manual.
- Circulate or communicate the quality manual to all employee and stakeholders through intranet, server location in the form of computer copy. So that everyone can have access and understand it.
Make sure your quality manual writing style is simple and easy that everyone can understand the organization goals and requirements.
There are lot of readymade template available now a days, you can use it and modified according to your organization need.
Quality Manual Example
You can refer below quality manual example to have more understanding about it.
This example includes all the requirements from the automotive QMS standards IATF and align to the organization needs and expectations.
Learn it and understand it…
