Management Responsibility - Section 5

5.1 Management Commitment

Quality starts at the top rather than the lower levels of a company. Top management must perform the duties show in clause 5.1.
Top management determines the vision, communicates it to the rest of the company. They must provide the resources for the system and they are charged with checking up on the vision from time to time. Top management may be one person in smaller companies or the board of directors or corporate officers in large companies. For most of use, top management is The Boss.

5.2 Customer Focus

Customers are the reason the lights are on, the doors are open for business and the bills get paid. Top management is to focus their attention on making your customers happy.

5.3 Quality Policy

The company should adopt a policy it can live with and not one that promises things that are not possible. What is said in the quality policy must be put into play. Everyone in the company has to know what the policy is and what it means. You don’t need to memorize it word for word. Just have a good understanding of what it is and what it means.
Top management must also review the policy at each management review to determine if it needs to be updated.

5.4 Planning

5.4.1 Quality Objectives
The objectives are the things we measure to determine if everything is going okay. The quality policy doesn’t have to contain the quality objectives, just be the framework for them. The objectives tell us the goals and purposes of what we are doing.

5.4.2 Quality Management System Planning
We have to plan out what we are going to do before we do it. No shooting from the hip. We have to make sure we are complying with the items in clause 4.1.

5.5 Responsibility, Authority and Communication

5.5.1 Responsibility and authority
Have you ever wondered just exactly what your job is? It’s very difficult to do a great job when no one has told you exactly what it is you’re suppose to do. This clause of the standard requires that job responsibilities and authorities be written down. The word ‘define’ means write it down.

5.5.2 Management Representative
The company must assign one person to be responsible overall for the QMS. This person may be called the management representative, quality manager or whatever their regular job title is. You must know who this person is in your company.

5.5.3 Internal Communications
Top management must make sure that they communicate with everyone in the company about the ISO 9001 system.

5.6 Management Review

Now that we have defined our quality policy, planned the implementation of the QMS, identified and defined the responsibilities and authorities to reach our goals, we need to periodically check and measure our progress and continually improve. This is called management review. Top management gets together and reviews all the processes to see how they are working.

See Quality Management System - Section 4

See Management Responsibility - Section 5 (top of page)

See Resource Management - Section 6

See Product Realization - Section 7

See Measurement, Analysis and Improvement - Section 8