Organization's top management ensures that responsibilities for relevant quality roles are assigned, communicated and understood within the organization. Along with responsibilities the roles usually require authorizations for certain actions, so that the responsibilities can successfully be filled.
When necessary, these roles need to be defined also in the process sequence in relevant steps, e.g. who can carry out a review or acceptance step in a process.
Top management shall clearly assign the responsibility at least for:
- QMS ownership (ensuring that the QMS conforms to selected requirements)
- process ownership (ensuring that processes deliver their intended outputs)
- QMS result communication (reporting on the performance of the QMS and on opportunities for improvement)
- customer focus ownership (ensuring the promotion of customer focus throughout the organization)
- QMS continuity (ensuring that the integrity of the QMS is maintained when changes to the QMS are planned and implemented)
