Glossary
Management review
ISO 9001 clause 9.3
The periodic review in which top management looks at whether the quality system is still working, using a defined list of inputs, and decides what changes.
Clause 9.3 asks top management to review the quality management system at planned intervals, and it is unusually specific about what has to go in: the status of actions from the previous review, changes in internal and external issues, customer feedback and complaints, process performance and conformity of products, audit results, supplier performance, adequacy of resources, and the effectiveness of actions taken on risks and opportunities.
The outputs are specified too: decisions on improvement opportunities, on changes needed to the system, and on resource needs. A review that produces minutes but no decisions does not meet the clause.
The reason the inputs are listed so precisely is that management review is the one moment where quality data is supposed to meet the people who can allocate budget. Without the list, the meeting drifts toward whatever was most recently annoying.
The practical difficulty in most operations is not holding the meeting; it is assembling the inputs. Where indicators live in one system, non-conformities in another and audit findings in a third, the review gets prepared by hand once a year, which is also why it tends to describe a system nobody has looked at in between.