Definition - What does Product Quality Management (PQM) mean?

Product quality management is a comprehensive set of tools that enables organizations

to control and manage the data related to product quality across enterprises. This
product data includes product and manufacturing defects, field failures, customer
complaints, product improvements and corrective and preventive actions requests.

Product Quality Management (PQM)

Quality management includes four major components:

Quality Planning: Continuous efforts to track defects and determine the causes behind
them.
Quality Control: Reducing production, repair and warranty costs through defect tracking
and repair.
Quality Assurance: Effective tracking of problem reports and customer complaints in an
effort to resolve the queries in a timely fashion.
Quality Improvement: Interaction with other enterprise customer relationship
management systems and integration with other enterprises for importing customer
complaints, quality related information and manufacturing problems. This speeds up the
quality tracking process and provides a central repository for tracking the data related to
product quality.

Many product suppliers recognize quality as a prime factor that can set their products
apart from those of their competitors. Many manufacturing companies now follow the
ISO 9000 series of standards, which are used by companies worldwide for product
quality management.