Understanding Section 9.3
Management review
This is an educational article on Section 9.3 of ISO 9001, entitled “Management Review”.
The purpose of this article is to give you an understanding of what Section 9.3 requires.
This article is directed towards:
- Those responsible for compliance to section 9.3.
- Those responsible for conducting management reviews.
- Others interested in understanding section 9.3.
Section 9.3 is entitled “Management Review” and it requires management to:
Review the Quality Management System regularly to ensure its continuing:
- Suitability
- Adequacy
- Effectiveness
- Alignment with strategic direction
How do you review the QMS? You are required to review the following:
- Changes in external and internal issues that are relevant to the quality management system
- The adequacy of resources
- The effectiveness of actions taken to address risks and opportunities
- Opportunities for improvement
- Customer satisfaction
- Feedback from interested parties
- Quality objective performance
- Process performance
- External Provider performance
- Nonconformities and corrective actions
- Monitoring and measurement results
- Audit results
- Also, the status of actions from previous management reviews
To review these items clearly you must have some kind of information to review.
Outputs of management review must include the following decisions and actions related to:
- Opportunities for improvement
- Changes to the quality management system
- Resource needs
- And records as evidence of the results of management review.
You do not need to perform management review as a single event. Only the sum of your activities need to result in a review of each of the items listed earlier. Management review is a hot target during a certification audit, so if you plan to meet this requirement through a multitude of activities, then you will need to clearly identify the who what where and how of these management review activities in your quality documents, and ensure that records are kept of all of them.
On the other hand, you could do management review as a major single event scheduled at a regular interval, say, annually for example. While this may be an easier way to organize management review, this may not be the best way to fulfill the purpose of management review. You should hold management review as often, and in as many ways, as is necessary to ensure quality performance, and some activities may have to be reviewed more frequently than other. But I have helped many companies who can do just fine with a single management review once a year – I am just warning that this may or may not be the case for you – so give this some thought.
For more information on how to implement this section, watch our implementation videos for section 9.3, and review our document templates for examples.