What Is Quality Management? Definition, Evolution, and Principles

Quality management is a business-wide set of activities that maintain and improve product and service quality.

These activities are organized through well-defined processes that aim to meet customer needs and progressively improve products, services, and processes to achieve quality excellence.

Unlike quality assurance, quality management involves top management and requires their leadership to set the quality policy and align it with business strategy.

In this article, I will share how quality gurus define quality, the principles of quality management, how quality evolved, and other key information quality professionals need.

What Is Quality

Quality is when your product or service meets customers’ needs and expectations.

Although there are other definitions by quality gurus, they don’t contradict each other but give more light and perspective to that important meaning:

David A. Garvin’s Definition:

Quality has eight dimensions:

• Performance
• Features
• Reliability
• Conformance
• Durability
• Serviceability
• Aesthetics
• Perceived quality

Dr. Joseph Juran’s Definition:

“fitness for use"

Dr. A. Blanton Godfrey’s Definition:

“The most fundamental truth is that quality is relative: If a competitor can produce a similar part and sell it at a lower price, we lose ... The customer focuses simply on value, seeing it as a ratio of quality over price … Only when we offer more value than our competitor do we really succeed”

Although Dr. Juran’s definition seems simple, it summarizes and highlights that quality professionals should focus on fitness for use.

Garvin’s definition helps quality professionals consider each listed aspect of quality and not forget its importance.

Dr. Godfrey emphasizes a unique aspect of quality: customers focus on the quality-price ratio, which can be translated as fitting the quality your market segment expects. Producing better doesn’t mean charging a higher price; it means delivering higher quality within the brand’s position.

Hence, Lexus isn’t better quality than Toyota; for Toyota customers, it is the best quality for their budget.

What Is a Quality Management System

Inspired by Total Quality Management (TQM) philosophy, a Quality Management System (QMS) is a set of processes and procedures that supports a company’s management and ensures customers receive the quality they expect.

ISO 9001 is the most widely used standard for implementing a quality management system. The system’s structure, as defined by this international standard, is based on the PDCA cycle (also known as the Deming cycle):

• Plan: Design the quality management system—including processes, objectives, and procedures—to meet customer requirements and expectations while accounting for quality-related risks and opportunities.
• Do: Implement the system.
• Check: Monitor process performance, audit the quality management system, and conduct management reviews to evaluate the QMS’s effectiveness.
• Act: Take action to improve the QMS’s performance.

Organizations repeat this cycle regularly to move progressively toward operational excellence. While the cycle duration varies by organization, a 12-month interval is most common.

Quality Management Standards

Other quality management standards, beyond ISO 9001, serve specific industries, such as AS9100 for aerospace, IATF 16949 for automotive manufacturing, ISO 13485 for medical devices, API Spec Q1 for oil and gas manufacturing, and API Spec Q2 for oil and gas service organizations.

What Is a Process?

A process is a chain of activities that transforms inputs into outputs.

For example, in a restaurant, a process called “Taking an order” is carried out through the following series of activities:

1. Seating the customer at a table
2. Presenting the menus
3. Taking down the order
4. Communicating the order to the chef

These processes fall into three categories: managerial, operational, and support.

• Management processes: processes that set the strategy and plan, monitor, and improve the quality management system.
• Operational processes: processes that contribute directly to customer value, including research and development, product assembly, and delivery.
• Support processes: these do not deliver value directly to the customer but support other processes by providing the resources and infrastructure needed—such as IT support, procurement, or human resources.

Evolution of Quality Management

Quality management has changed significantly from the 19th century to the present day:

1. Craftsmanship

Although this economic model still exists, it dominated product and service delivery before the Industrial Revolution.

Artisans have the know-how to transform raw materials into finished products; beyond manufacturing expertise, they also procure the necessary raw materials and tools.

However, artisans’ production capacity is far more limited than that of industrial manufacturers.

2. Quality Control

With the advent of assembly lines—driven by organizational models inspired by Taylorism and Fordism—manufacturers no longer needed expert craftspeople on the production floor. Each worker was assigned a clear, limited task requiring specialized knowledge for that function rather than broad expertise.

This let manufacturers increase production volume and speed while lowering costs; assembly line operators, unlike expert craftspeople, earned lower wages.

These factors—limited expertise, high workloads, and the need for speed—compelled manufacturers to add a step before product delivery: quality control. This ensures the product meets both its technical specifications and the customer’s order.

While waiting until the end of the production line to perform checks helps ensure customer satisfaction, identifying defects earlier saves time (and therefore money) by allowing for corrections much sooner in the process. Even raw materials are inspected because they directly affect the final product’s quality.

3. Quality Assurance

Quality assurance focuses on preventing defects through planned and systematic activities throughout the product or service realization process.

This proactive approach involves planning processes to ensure they meet customer requirements and expectations. Quality assurance is also more cost-effective than relying solely on quality control because it designs production to generate fewer defects.

4. Quality Management

Quality management takes a holistic approach; it includes any process that directly or indirectly impacts quality.

Quality assurance is similar to quality management, as it functions as a subsystem of a Quality Management System (QMS). Additionally, QMS incorporates a strategic component that ensures quality objectives align with the company’s overall strategic direction.

What Are the Main Principles of Quality Management

Quality management principles are:

• Customer focus: the voice of customers is the principal input in quality planning, and the aim is to satisfy them
• Leadership: the top management has to demonstrate their engagement in the quality management system and serve as an example to the rest of the organization
• Engagement of people: without the engagement of employees, no management system would succeed
• Process approach: rather than organizing the company into isolated departmental silos, the process approach promotes cross-functional collaboration across the organization.
• Improvement: there is no permanent state of the system; a QMS should always seek a better state and improve it to better align with customer needs and adapt to its environment
• Evidence-based decision-making: there is no room for arbitrary decisions, except evidence-based and data-oriented decisions
• Relationship management: the context of the organization is represented by its stakeholders; good management of the relationship with them makes the organization an active actor in its environment rather than reactive

Common Misconception: Where to Start

Many companies make the mistake of jumping straight into implementing a quality management system. This often stems from a client or prospective customer requiring—or offering extra points for—ISO 9001 certification within their tender specifications.

While well-intentioned, this approach is, in most cases, both harmful and counterproductive.

This approach is only truly viable if an organization has already established a solid level of quality assurance in its processes—or, better yet, has achieved a high degree of operational excellence by implementing Lean management principles or Six Sigma projects (using the DMAIC methodology) to reduce process variability. In such a scenario, ISO 9001 compliance serves a strategic purpose: it aligns the existing system with the company’s broader policy and strategy, effectively crowning years of hard work.

Conversely, if an organization lacks a quality assurance system (operational quality), trying to comply with a standard like ISO 9001—which focuses on “what” to do rather than “how” to do it—often results in a purely bureaucratic system designed only to meet requirements and pass the certification audit.

Once the certificate is framed on the wall and displayed on the company website, the reality sets in: the system—devised exclusively for certification—is neither useful nor practical. It ends up tucked away in a drawer for a year, then pulled out again before the next surveillance audit, given a quick update, backdated with a few records, and the cycle repeats.

This “placebo” approach rarely lasts more than three years (the typical certification cycle); eventually, an auditor will see through the charade and suspend the certification.

Quality Management vs. Quality Assurance vs. Quality Engineering

Quality engineers are central to the quality management system. As we highlighted, Quality Management includes a strategic component and a quality assurance system.

Within the Quality assurance processes and methodologies, we can find activities of quality engineers such as:

• Designing a product or service (using, for instance, design for Six Sigma methodology).
• Running FMEA analysis to assess process or product failures.
• Implementing Lean Manufacturing principles: eliminating waste, reorganizing the workplace (5S), and switching to a pull production system.
• Monitoring process capability through Statistical Process Control (SPC).
• Leading DMAIC projects to reduce variability for existing processes.

Some activities require comprehensive statistical knowledge, while others require less technical knowledge but more problem-solving skills and creativity.

Why Is Quality Management Important

Quality Management has several benefits other than the ones related to customer satisfaction and direct quality benefit that make it important:

• It gives quality further perspective and projection to longer terms
• Groups the scattered chunks of quality engineering activities into clear and organized processes
• As it aligns with organizational strategy, it gives a stronger commitment from top management
• It brings the concept of organizational context, which helps stay adaptive to a fast-changing environment and regulations.

Quality Management Certifications

The following standards are used for the certification of quality management systems:

There are also certifications for persons applicable to quality management and its subdomains:

• The Certified Quality Engineer (CQE) from the American Society for Quality (ASQ)
• The Certified Quality Professional (CQP) from the International Lean Six Sigma Institute (ILSSI)
• The Process Improvement Excellence (PIEx) certification from the Management and Strategy Institute (MSI)
• Lean Six Sigma Certifications
• Lean Management Certifications
• ISO 9001 Implementer Certification
• ISO 9001 Auditor Certification
• Intermediate Level Continuous Improvement Certifications

Final Thoughts

Quality management has evolved and continues to progress. In the machine learning and agentic AI era, it is moving faster. Hence, today we started discussing a new version of quality: Quality 4.0, which combines new technology.

The good news is that algorithms are now handling not only the analytical aspects of quality but also the administrative burden of creating reports. The new quality model gives practicing quality engineers more time to do what they love: solve real problems!

Discover our guide to the best quality engineering certifications for professionals and students available in 2026!