Jan
25
BMS or QMS? What’s the difference?
With the strong resurgence of end-user focused process improvement, Quality Management Systems (QMS) and Business Management Systems (BMS) are back in vogue. So is there a difference between the two or are these just synonymous terms for the same thing?
In the majority of organisations process improvement is initiated in one of two ways. Either it comes about as a pre-requisite for process automation or as a means to improve consistency and compliance in human activities. The former, usually driven by business analysts and process architects, is detailed and specialist and its application is to IT systems rather than people. The latter, which is referred at as an End-User system, is all about people and the subject of this article. End user systems need a mechanism to carefully disseminate and control the processes so they are easily made available to employees for use. It is these systems which are referred to as a QMS or BMS.
If the focus is quality, the system is likely to be managed by the Quality department and called a QMS. Its use tends to be as a parallel system for reference by employees as and when they need to check the compliant way to conduct a particular task. Usually the QMS sits at the edge of an intranet and may be one of several systems which an employee may access for information from time to time.
A BMS on the other hand should be the one system which drives all employee behaviour. All information which an employee needs, regardless of his or her role, should be there in front of them at the point of need, enabling them to effortlessly conduct their day to day activities. In quality-critical industries such as engineering and manufacturing there is often a clear migration path from one to the other. The system might start life as the means to achieve a particular ISO accreditation but if it is to be really valuable it should incorporate all of the operational and support processes in the organisation i.e. it should manage the Value Chain. Structured well, a BMS should be the means by which strategy is turned into the delivery of high performance corporate results; enabling corporate goals to be cascaded into appropriately detailed KPIs, processes to be optimised for their successful delivery, data coordinated, controlled and made available at the point of need and performance effortlessly measured. A good BMS is the link between the supply chain, operations and customer satisfaction. It should enable all suppliers to sing off the same hymn sheet as the assembler/manufacturer, align planning with quality and make Lean a reality.
Over the next few weeks E Squared is going to be showcasing a number of companies that have created and managed powerful BMSs. If you would like to be alerted of these, the simplest way is to follow us on Twitter at twitter.com/esquaredgroup.
