7 Quality Management Principles of ISO 9001: What They Are, Why They Matter, and How to Bring Them to Life

ISO 9001 is a globally recognized standard for quality management systems. It offers a structured framework for organizations to effectively plan, implement, and enhance their quality management process, irrespective of their size and domain.

Think of ISO 9001 as a global rulebook for quality management. It’s built around 7 core quality principles, a clear framework of 10 clauses, and key guidelines that focus on continual improvement and risk-based thinking.

Although the ISO 9001 framework has been a guiding light for modern leadership, the 7 key quality management principles have played a vital role in embedding a culture of improvement, accountability, and customer focus across organizations.

Let’s pause for a moment; why do you think these 7 principles exist?

Well, let’s imagine a bakery unit where the baker forgets to preheat the oven or uses a spoiled ingredient. In both cases, the only thing compromised is the quality of the product and, ultimately, the customer experience.

That’s where written compliance guidelines or principles become important. They ensure that even remote or independently operated teams follow the same standards. It’s just like ordering from the same pizza chain anywhere in the world—the taste and quality remain consistent because every outlet follows the same rules, irrespective of the location.

Let’s cover each principle in detail and understand how they can contribute to shaping an excellent quality management strategy.

7 Quality Management Principles of ISO 9001

1. Customer Focus

The primary aim of quality management is to outline a customer-centric approach. It remains a non-negotiable principle for modern organizations like yours to survive in such a competitive market where every other organization is trying to offer the best.

With customer focus as a principle, you can actually align your product or service with the current and the future needs of customers. It helps ensure customer satisfaction and loyalty while creating an opportunity to enhance repeat business and market share.

You can start by creating custom forms and surveys or use dedicated dashboards to visualize market research, customer feedback, or competitor analysis. It can help you align the organizational process and objective with the customer’s needs and expectations.

For sure, customer focus means a lot more than just improving the quality. Instead, it highlights the importance of finding factors crucial to exceeding customer expectations.

While you can regularly revamp SOPs and employee training for updated customer response or complaint summaries, you can also monitor key metrics like customer satisfaction scores, customer retention rates, and complaint rates to pinpoint areas for further improvement.

Here is what to remember when it comes to customer focus:

• Understand and prioritize customer needs and expectations.
• Deliver consistent quality to build trust and long-term relationships.
• Actively seek feedback and monitor responses to exceed expectations.

2. Leadership

‘Leadership at all levels,’ as highlighted by ISO 9001:2015 quality management principles, outlines the role of top management and leaders at all levels in driving a culture of responsibility, influence, and commitment to a quality-focused environment.

Effective leadership is not just about authority or managing teams—it’s about creating a unified vision and purpose and inspiring the entire organization to get aligned with it.

Well, in that case, what should be your take on leadership?

You can start by prioritizing these four leadership enablers:

• Vision and communication
• Trust and integrity
• Empowerment
• Accountability

For sure, a robust quality management system plays a vital role in outlining a clear vision and empowers you with the ability to communicate it seamlessly to every stakeholder involved in the quality processes.

You can leverage a centralized portal to post vision and strategic updates, create role-specific workflows or libraries, grant permission-based access, and track and monitor the progress—encouraging strategic alignment and a shared understanding of quality objectives.

3. Engagement of People

Along with the well-structured processes and leadership direction, the active involvement of everyone, from top management to frontline workers, is equally important to drive innovation and exceed customer expectations.

Why does the engagement of people matter?

Quality is not just a one-person job or a checkbox to tick; it is a strategic mindset that must be embraced across the organization.

You can understand it this way. The quality process involves several stages and decision-makers. For example, in a manufacturing process, from procurement and product design to production and customer service, multiple teams and departments are involved in keeping the process up and running.

When people are involved and take ownership of their work, the result is impressive. There will be fewer incidents, rework, and scrap, thereby leading to happier customers and a stronger brand reputation.

Now how can you achieve this?

Sharing responsibilities and engaging people becomes easy if you operate in the SharePoint ecosystem. While you can seamlessly collaborate with your inter-departmental teams, SharePoint empowers you to share documentation, evidence, and reports with cross-functional teams and departments with the same ease.

You can leverage automated workflows to get your task reviewed or approved within a specific timeline or easily assign tasks or monitor them within the system. Along with features like document versioning, centralized repositories, and a dedicated activity log, it not only redefines quality assurance but also prepares you for internal or external compliance audits.

4. Process Approach

The process approach, as mentioned in ISO 9001 quality management principles, recommends that organizations must create interconnected processes instead of relying on isolated systems.

It is like imagining the whole organization as an interlinked system in which each task, department, or process is considered one and collectively contributes to a larger system for consistent and controlled outcomes.

Certainly, siloed processes lead to poor communication, reduce efficiency, and even cause inconsistent and more fragmented customer experience.

However, applying cause-and-effect relationships while outlining different workflows, reducing complex and redundant processes, and clearly defining the roles can help you achieve a greater goal much faster and easier.

Now, how effectively you can implement it in real life depends on how efficient your quality management system is.

SharePoint environment allows users to create, modify, and access the latest version of quality guidelines and protocols, ensuring the correct approach is implemented since the inception of the process.

It reduces the chance of deviations, incidents, and nonconformance that could lead to serious implications such as inferior quality, product recall, or reputational damage.

While you can always automate multi-level processes like the CAPA process, document approvals, change control, and training requests, it also helps you assign permissions at the document, site, or list levels.

5. Improvement

Improvement in ISO 9001 refers to the continuous effort that an organization puts into enhancing its products, services, processes, and the entire quality system.

The primary aim of quality management is not just to react to failures or complaints; instead, it strives to proactively look for opportunities to exceed the quality standards promised to the customer.

Why are more and more organizations focusing on improvement nowadays?

Evidently, the current market dynamics will not remain the same forever, and the needs of your end-users are evolving with time.

Consistent efforts for improvement help you increase efficiency, reduce waste, improve customer satisfaction, and, most importantly, empower your teams to innovate and adapt to changes.

You can align your QMS with this quality management principle by:

• Centralizing nonconformance and corrective action management.
• Track previous incident trends and highlight the vulnerabilities within the system.
• Creating custom fields for different stakeholders to submit recommendations, opinions, or feedback.
• Prioritizing effective root cause analysis and internal audits.

6. Evidence-Based Decision Making

ISO 9001 principles try to establish a firm foundation of proven data and information to support the organizational decision-making process.

Indeed, decisions that lack solid evidence are often based on specific biases or inconsistent and outdated practices, which in turn increases the risk of poor quality and wasted resources.

While evidence-based decision making not only validates the process but increases the probability of achieving desired results out of that process.

However, what counts as strong evidence is still a valid question to ask.

Apart from the customer satisfaction data and feedback, you can consider internal audit findings, nonconformance reports, supplier evaluations, market research, activity logs, and previous trends as reliable evidence that can shape your decision-making process.

A well-structured, digital quality management system serves as a single source of truth for quality-related documentation, including reports, records, forms, and more.

Well, the centralized and secure repositories with metadata integration not only help you quickly access the data but also ensure that you have access to the most updated and verified information.

Leveraging custom templates to record suggestions or recommendations, detailed activity logs to track actions, and custom lists and dashboards for historical data analysis ensures consistent evidence recording and minimizes confusion across cross-functional teams.

7. Relationship Management

ISO 9001 quality management principles focus on effective relationship management with interested parties for sustained success.

It refers to the strategic and proactive management of relations not only with customers but also with suppliers, regulators, partners, and internal stakeholders.

It is like how a medical device manufacturer collaborates with both suppliers and hospitals to develop, review, and refine products that meet the real needs of the users. Here, the hospital is the end-user, suppliers provide critical components, and the manufacturer brings it all together.

The core idea is to highlight that no organization can achieve quality in isolation, and effectively managing relationships fosters mutual trust, collaboration, and shared value to ultimately achieve consistent and long-term success.

However, this becomes easy with a QMS that acts as a centralized hub for interested parties to collaborate, communicate, and share documents.

While you can create dedicated modules to streamline supplier management, customer complaints, and more, it offers separate document repositories and visually attractive dashboards to organize files and track key relationship metrics like on-time delivery, defect rates, and audit scores.

Also, automating recurring processes like supplier evaluation, CAPA action plan, and partner feedback loop, building custom forms to gather regular feedback, and conducting supplier audits can help you promote trust and transparency.

BizPortals QMS: Bridging the ISO 9001 principles with a SharePoint-based solution

The 7 core quality management principles of ISO 9001—customer focus, engagement of people, process approach, improvement, evidence-based decision making, and relationship management—have helped organizations build a strong foundation for their quality management systems.

More than theoretical concepts, they are actionable strategies that completely revamp your idea of delivering quality.

BizPortals QMS, a SharePoint-based solution, offers an integrated ecosystem that aligns with ISO 9001 quality management principles.

With dedicated modules to track nonconformities, risks, documents, CAPA, and more, it offers a secure and collaborative space to efficiently plan, automate, implement, and improve your quality management processes.

Features like cross-module integration, document control, e-signature, and automated workflow not only streamline the quality processes but also offer a complete experience that fosters a culture of innovation, transparency, and accountability.

Want to see the powerful features of BizPortals QMS live in action? Please book a slot with our experts at your comfort. They are ready to help you out.