Gluu Glossary

Quality Management (QM)

Quality management (QM) is the systematic oversight of the activities needed to keep products, services, and processes at – and moving toward – a defined standard of excellence.

It rests on four disciplines: quality planning, quality assurance, quality control, and quality improvement. An organisation’s quality management system (QMS) is what formalises this – the documented processes, policies, and resources that make the standard repeatable rather than accidental.

QM as a distinct field dates to the statistical methods of the 1920s, but it only became standard business practice from the 1950s on. Toyota and other Japanese manufacturers later took QM further than most, turning it into a competitive advantage rather than a compliance exercise.