Abstract Purpose Over one million organisations have a quality management system (QMS) certified to the ISO 9001 standard; however, the system requires a lot of resources and its value has been questioned. This critique also leads to a questioning of the strategic relevance of quality management. The purpose of this paper is to explore how different types of uses of QMS correlate with management perceptions of quality management in terms of respect, cost and strategic importance. Design/methodology/approach The paper is based on a mixed method data collection strategy, quantitative data being collected from a survey in 8 organisations (n = 108) and qualitative data being collected from 12 interviews with quality managers in 12 different organisations. Findings The paper shows that a compliance-oriented QMS usage will more likely lead to a view of quality management as costly and of little respect, than a business or improvement-oriented QMS usage. Moreover, it nuances the view on compliance-oriented usage, showing that it is mainly documentation that negatively influences how management views quality management, whereas standardisation that is part of the compliance-oriented use is perceived as more value-adding. Originality/value This paper suggests three types of QMS use, namely, business management, improvement, and compliance-oriented use, and that a wise selection of how to use the QMS will affect the respect, strategic importance and cost that management associates with quality management. Keywords ISO 9001, Auditing, Quality management system, Quality Management, Quality audit Paper type Research paper Introduction Today, more than one million companies and organisations globally are certified in accordance with ISO 9001 (ISO International Organization for Standardization, 2018 Ida Gremyr, Jan Lenning, Mattias Elg and Jason Martin. Published by Emerald Publishing Limited. This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate andcreate derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode The authors are grateful for the support from the Swedish Quality Management Academy and the organisations participating in this study. Further, we acknowledge financial support from the Production Area of Advance at Chalmers and the HELIX Competence Centre at Linkping University. Value of quality management systems 381 Received 29 October 2020 Revised 27 January 2021 Accepted 4 June 2021 International Journal of Quality and Service Sciences Vol. 13 No. 3, 2021 pp. 381-394 Emerald Publishing Limited 1756-669X DOI 10.1108/IJQSS-10-2020-0170 The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at: https://www.emerald.com/insight/1756-669X.htm Survey). In organisations quality management work, a substantial amount of time and focus is given to the quality management systems (QMS) (Elg et al., 2011). Thus, it is important that QMS adds value to the organisations (Lenning and Gremyr, 2017). The interest in QMS has further grown by its potential to support sustainability efforts through integrated management systems, or by improving environmental management systems based on lessons learned from QMS (Siva et al., 2016). This potential has, however, not yet been fully exploited, and it is suggested that increased formalization and bureaucracy, induced by a certified QMS, is a reason stated for cases in which quality management hinders rather than support implementation of sustainability efforts (Allur et al., 2018; Barouch and Kleinhans, 2015). Even with a focus on QMS per se, that is, not as a support for an environmental management system, QMS has been subject to critique for hindering creativity, being detached from actual practice and providing limited support for quality improvement (Poksinska et al., 2006), having negative effects on process compliance (Gray et al., 2015; Karapetrovic et al., 2010) and can limit focus to production and management systems instead of supporting sustainable development and green innovation (Li et al., 2018).