Quality Integration

Quality Integration (QI) implies professional quality practices that are integrated seamlessly with normal business processes in any kinds of organizations. Quality integration includes Quality Management (QM) and Quality Assurance (QA) that become practical and effective business solutions through sound guiding ideas and principles, effective methods and tools, and creative infrastructure.

Quality management means management of an organization with regard to quality. It equals the quality of management. Quality management is a managerial issue. Here the quality is the degree to which the organization fulfills its stakeholders' needs and expectations. Quality assurance implies all those business activities that aim at creating and strengthening confidence among an organization's customers and other stakeholders. Quality assurance is a communication issue. Quality management is the necessary basis for a convincing quality assurance.

Quality integration covers all the subject areas considered within the recognized ISO 9000 standards and performance excellence models (quality awards criteria). Also the topics of many other specialized management areas, e.g. environmental management, safety management, risk management, and information security management, are typical sub-domains of the quality integration.

One can also find significant ideas for quality integration from teachings of recognized gurus of quality profession and through benchmarking from the practices of world class organizations although they are not necessarily explicitly expressed as quality integration aspects. Even large national and international quality movements emphasize the approach of business-integrated quality.

Quality Integration was invented as a concept and introduced to practical business solutions at Sonera Corporation in the 1990's.