Quality management teams establishment

To put these leadership goals into practice, we have established Quality Management Teams (QMT) in each of our plants. The QMT consists of the complete plant management team—quality, production, engineering, technical support, human resources, and finance. The plant managers chair the QMT to symbolize their responsibility for quality and because they have the power to assure all employees follow the quality principles. The purpose of the QMT is ... 

Teams such as quality improvement teams (QIT), may be used for implementation of all Quality Management projects. These teams are usually established for specific improvement projects and consist of staff involved in the management processes under review. For this project, PSM and ESH specialists, operations, maintenance, and engineering representatives would be members of the team. 

Measurement of performance. Quality Management requires that measures of performance be established for every activity. These measures include end-of-pipe measurement, such as amounts of material released into the environment or injury rates, and in-process measures of how efficiently you are managing, such as time to review safety improvement proposals or total resources expended on PSM. Each team should be required to identify potential performance measures for the processes they are developing and the activities these processes manage. Many of the end-of-pipe measures will already exist these should be critically examined to ensure that they truly measure performance and are not unduly influenced by other factors. For example, the number of accidents in a fleet of road vehicles is almost directly dependent on the number of miles driven with no improvement in performance, a reduction in miles driven would reduce the number of accidents. 

As with any computer system handling critical data, the choice of supplier is crucial to on-time and in-full delivery of a system meeting both client and regulatory expectations. Key considerations should be the robustness of the supplier s Quality Management System, the caliber of the project team put forward by the supplier, and the supplier s previous experience with similar blood establishment clients/projects. 

That independence is critical. An in-house quality assurance (QA) person may qualify as long as reporting relations establish complete independence from the facility management. For example, some large pharmaceutical companies use their own audit teams, reporting directly to an upper level executive, to wander the globe investigating corporate facilities. 

The scope and depth of a safety culture is dependent on how well the safety management system information is communicated. Begin to think in terms of your personal and professional network. Your network will determine the speed that your safety management system information moves through your organizahon. The quality of your informahon and its value to the leadership team and employees establishes the percephon of safety, and in turn, your influence on the safety culture. 

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