Management Review and ISO 9001 requirement

A Management Review is a formal, structured meeting which involves top management and takes place at regular intervals throughout the year. They are a critical and required part of running an ISO certified Management System.

The purpose of a Management Review meeting is to review and evaluate the effectiveness of your Management System, helping you to determine its continued suitability and adequacy. The Management Review does this by encouraging top management to consider the degree by which the Management System:

• Achieves the expected results
• Meets the organisation’s requirements
• Functions in accordance with the established operating procedures and processes
• Is capable of identifying non-conformities and monitoring subsequent corrective and preventive actions

A Management Review also ensures that all levels of management are made aware of any changes, updates, revisions, etc. to the day-to-day workings of the Management System itself.

As Management Reviews are so important to getting the most out of a Management System, the member of senior management that has overall responsibility for the Management System is also accountable for convening, attending and reporting on Management Reviews.

Note that there is a difference between Management Meetings and Management Reviews. The former may address the day-to-day working practices, sales, production, resources and staffing matters, but the Management Review focuses solely on the requirements of the Management System, as described within your Manual or documented information.

The guidance shown on this page is relevant to ISO 9001, ISO 14001 and ISO 45001. Top management must periodically review the management system to ensure its continuing suitability, adequacy, and effectiveness. The frequency or intervals of the Top management’s formal review must be defined.

The management review must address the possible need for changes to policy, objectives, targets, and other elements of the management system. If you need a procedure and forms to help your business control its management review process, click here.

Here's what management systems stanards are really all about: defining a policy and creating a plan with relevant objectives. You then implement the system according to the plan and begin auditing, monitoring and measuring performance against the plan and reacting to your findings.

As such; management review meetings provide useful insight into the operation of the management system and its processes to enable Top management to respond to issues and to recommend improvements.

As per Clause 5.1 of the standards, it is important that a member of Top management chairs the management review meetings. It is imperative that everyone involved with the management review process fully understand and appreciate the management review requirements from Clause 9.3.

Other attendees at management review meetings should include functional management, line management, process owners, process champions, lead process users, and action owners within the scope of the quality management system, as appropriate, and the internal auditor(s) should also attend.

The management review process must ensure that the necessary information is collected ahead of time to allow management to effectively carry out an evaluation prior to the meeting. Note taking and action recording is often undertaken by the Management Representative who will forward minutes of the management review meeting to those on the distribution list and to those with actions

There are no specified time periods applicable to conducting management review meetings. However, they should be organized with a frequency and format commensurate to the level of risks and the complexity of your organization.

Critical management review agenda items, such as; process performance, customer feedback and monitoring and measuring results should be reviewed monthly, while less critical agenda items, such as reviewing the quality policy and objectives should be undertaken less frequently, perhaps every quarter.

This approach minimizes the length of each management review meeting, covers all of the required management review inputs over the duration of the management review programme, and allows for the analysis of trends in data while the information is contemporary. Our management system templates include this type of management review programme, you can download a copy for free.

Annual management reviews are insufficient in frequency to be able react to any issues effectively. Performance metrics should be monitored with varying frequencies, some hourly, some daily, some weekly and some monthly. Management cannot wait for six months to respond, if they do, it will be too late.

Top management might conduct weekly meetings in which they review metrics and objectives to determine if any corrective action is required. The process owner is then responsible for reporting close out progress in the meeting a week later. Every time management convenes to review and react to performance, it is considered as a management review.

Some companies have multiple review levels, whereby, each review may require multiple subjects and rely upon multiple metrics as inputs. Sometimes subjects are reviewed at more than one level, e.g. production numbers might be reviewed by the Production teams during daily production meetings and then by senior management, possibly weekly.

Input

The management review SHALL be planned and carried out taking into consideration:

a) the status of actions from previous management reviews;

b) changes in external and internal issues that are relevant to the quality management system;

c) information on the performance and effectiveness of the quality management system, including trends in:

    1.customer satisfaction and feedback from relevant interested parties;

    2.the extent to which quality objectives have been met;

    3.process performance and conformity of products and services;

    4.nonconformities and corrective actions;

    5.monitoring and measurement results;

    6.audit results;

    7.the performance of external providers;

d) the adequacy of resources;

e) the effectiveness of actions taken to address risks and opportunities (see 6.1);

f) opportunities for improvement.

Output

Management review SHALL include decisions and actions related to:

a)opportunities for improvement;

b)any need for changes to the quality management system;

c)resource needs.

The organization SHALL retain DOCUMENTED INFORMATION as evidence of the results of management reviews.