Over the past 50 years, organizations have been encouraged to create management systems to ensure performance predictability and instill confidence in customers that they are doing things the right way.
Much of this encouragement has come from national and international standards developed to provide benchmarks against which these systems can be evaluated. The world is an immensely complex and sometimes chaotic place where countries, organizations, and individuals interact in an ever-changing environment.
When organizational managers face complex, large-scale problems, it is often necessary to break them down into more manageable parts, ensuring that each part is addressed separately, not necessarily at the same time or by the same people. The results of these separate efforts are then presented as a solution to the original problem. But can we be sure that the sum of the adopted solutions is better than the whole?
To address this challenge, organizations can implement management system certifications. As organizations have grown more complex, they have recognized that a silo mentality is dangerous, as solving one problem in isolation often creates another (of equal or greater impact) elsewhere. A short-sighted organization operating in silos may not immediately realize that a correction in one area could generate a larger issue elsewhere due to the interconnected nature of actions and events.
Over the past 60 years, new theories have emerged that help us understand complexity by viewing certain situations as interconnected systems rather than isolated components. This is the essence of the management system approach.
ISO 9001:2015 requires an organization to establish a quality management system but does not provide an operational definition that removes ambiguity regarding what type of system this should be. Since each of us may perceive an organization differently, our understanding of the quality management system depends on how we view the organization itself.
The term “system” is defined by ISO 9000:2015 as a set of related or interacting elements. However, we can extend this definition to say that a system is an organized collection of interdependent components working together for a common purpose. These components retain their characteristics only within the system, and their absence would alter the system itself.
The concept of quality systems emerged after World War II, when industrial practices were still largely based on the scientific management principles defined by Frederick Winslow Taylor. Taylor discovered that when work methods were left to individuals, there were multiple ways of doing things and significant variations in results. However, when tasks were clearly defined, and workers were properly trained and motivated, productivity improved significantly.
One of the earliest definitions of a “quality system” came from Armand Feigenbaum in 1961, who described it as "the network of managerial and technical procedures required to produce and deliver a product at specified quality standards" (Feigenbaum, 1961). Even today, there is no unanimous agreement on what precisely constitutes a “quality system,” and even within various ISO documents, notable differences exist in how the quality management system is defined.
According to ISO 9000:2015, section 3.5.3, a quality system is defined as a set of related or interacting elements within an organization, established to define policies, objectives, and processes necessary to achieve those objectives. However, the ISO Small Enterprise Handbook states that a quality management system is the approach an organization uses to guide and control activities related (directly or indirectly) to achieving expected results. Meanwhile, the ISO Guide "Reaping the Benefits of ISO 9001" describes a quality management system as a method for defining how an organization can meet customer and stakeholder requirements.
Furthermore, in ISO 9000:2015, section 2.2.2, it is explained that a quality management system includes the activities through which an organization identifies its objectives and determines the processes and resources required to achieve the desired results. However, ambiguity arises from how this definition is structured. Upon analysis, the definition consists of two statements:
- A system of interconnected or interacting elements within an organization that serves to define policies and objectives, and
- A system that also includes the processes necessary to achieve those objectives.
However, if a system is defined by ISO 9000 as a set of related or interacting elements, then a management system would be composed of a system plus its processes. By substituting the ISO 9000 definition of a process, we can deduce that a management system is:
- "A system of interconnected or interacting elements within an organization that serves to define policies and objectives," and
- "A set of related or interacting activities that utilize inputs to produce an expected outcome."
The second ISO definition is fundamentally different because it refers to a method of managing and controlling activities, implying a methodology, as a methodology is simply a way of doing something.
The third definition differs further as it focuses on how an organization can achieve its goals. This definition suggests that a management system is a method for creating a description, prescription, or possibly a specification.
The fourth definition, from ISO 9000:2015, implies that the QMS is a management subsystem because it is limited to identifying and determining certain aspects while excluding others.
These definitions were designed for different audiences, which explains the stylistic differences, but they lack full coherence, potentially causing comprehension challenges.