What should be discussed in Management Review Meetings?

Management review is an extremely important part of the success of your quality management system and your most significant source for improvements. Management review can be used to tie together all the elements of your program and bring cohesiveness to your quality management system. You should focus your attention on "trends, objective evidence, and data-based decisions," not on daily operations.

We recommend the following topics be included on your management review agenda:

• Follow-up actions: from previous management review meetings
• Quality Assurance Report: including nonconforming/hold/rework product data, and regulatory issues
• Equipment/Maintenance: may include calibration information, repair & maintenance trending data, equipment downtime
• Quality Subcontractors: quality related subcontractor problems and actions, subcontractor trends
• Customer Complaints: summary of complaints for trending of feedback, issues and resulting actions
• Corrective and Preventive Actions: type & source of issues, areas most commonly having issues, trends of root causes, reoccurring problems
• Internal Auditing: audit results, audit schedule, nonconformances by area and ISO clause
• Quality Planning: upcoming projects, status of ongoing projects, significant changes including staffing
• Resources: people & training, facility, and equipment,
• Improvement: review of quality policy, quality objectives and overall quality system effectiveness and improvement of system and product.

Other topics may be added as appropriate depending on the nature of your business. There may be some slight variations for service industries (perhaps no equipment or subcontracting used).

How often should we have management review meetings?

There is no specific requirement for frequency of management review meetings. We recommend quarterly meetings. This allows you to stay on top of upcoming issues and yet collect data between meetings that is meaningful. We have found annual meetings are not acceptable to all registrars. With annual meetings you may not be able to prevent issues or resolves issues in a timely manner.

What record do we need of our management review meetings?

Try to keep good, detailed records of what was discussed, what conclusions were reached and what actions are needed. If you have set up your meetings around your quality objectives, then for each topic at the meeting ask the following questions:

• What is your measurement?
• What is your objectives?
• How are you doing?
• Are there any trends?
• Is there any action needed? (e.g. people, process, materials, equipment)
• Is there anything else we should consider?

This allows you to spend time on the items needing attention. Keep notes on your answers.

We often assist in developing objectives and establishing good processes for management review by working with you or attending one or more of your meetings. If you are interested in help with your management review process, please contact us.