What Does Product Quality Management Mean?
Product quality management is a comprehensive set of tools that enables organizations to control and manage the data related to product quality across enterprises. This product data includes product and manufacturing defects, field failures, customer complaints, product improvements and corrective and preventive actions requests.
Techopedia Explains Product Quality Management
Quality management includes four major components:
- Quality Planning: Continuous efforts to track defects and determine the causes behind them.
- Quality Control: Reducing production, repair and warranty costs through defect tracking and repair.
- Quality Assurance: Effective tracking of problem reports and customer complaints in an effort to resolve the queries in a timely fashion.
- Quality Improvement: Interaction with other enterprise customer relationship management systems and integration with other enterprises for importing customer complaints, quality related information and manufacturing problems. This speeds up the quality tracking process and provides a central repository for tracking the data related to product quality.
Many product suppliers recognize quality as a prime factor that can set their products apart from those of their competitors. Many manufacturing companies now follow the ISO 9000 series of standards, which are used by companies worldwide for product quality management.