Why Quality has become a key part of the Executive Agenda

In 2019, Boston Consulting Group published an article titled “Serious About Quality? Then Make It a Part of Your Culture”.

The article brought to the fore the following aspects related to quality management, that are especially relevant for senior management leaders:

1. Across industries, quality (and safety) management has become a key part of the executive agenda.
2. While companies have certainly invested in digital tools and partnered with IT firms to implement quality management systems – for whatever reason – these solutions alone haven’t been enough to prevent glaring quality issues and failures. According to the BCG article, these failures have largely been because of issues related to the lack of a quality culture.
3. At a number of companies, quality has become a “checkbox” item; Leaders across teams are looking at quality management in disparate silos, often ignoring the big picture of how to use quality as a function to drive competitive advantage.
4. It is important to note that across industries, the overall cost of poor quality is touching hundreds of millions of dollars. From automotive and manufacturing to pharmaceutical, medical device and healthcare – it has become imperative for senior leaders to work closely with the quality and safety team, to build an overall quality culture that is both metrics-driven and proactive in terms of prevention.

Broadly speaking, there is unanimous agreement that top-notch quality performance has an impact on the following areas: financial, operational, brand and operations. It certainly drives efficiency, reduces costs, increases trust in the brand, delivers customer satisfaction and delight – all of which have a direct impact on top and bottom-lines.

Of course, quality is also a regulatory requirement. But that’s not the only reason why you need a QMS in your organization. A cloud-based enterprise-wide quality management system can benefit companies across the board – from startups to Fortune 500 firms. In some cases, companies tend to look at implementing a modern QMS as an additional cost, possibly an investment that can be done later; They end up settling for a rudimentary or siloed QMS solution that eventually proves to be a bottleneck.

The Cost of Poor Quality is a major issue facing businesses. From engineering to production, any process that is not optimized for quality will lead to defective products, making the business incur a cost of poor quality (CoPQ). There are four areas where costs add up — prevention cost, appraisal cost, internal failure cost, and external failure cost.

The point is implementing a EQMS solution is an investment you’ll not regret. It’ll pay for itself in no time, and by truly integrating people, processes and systems, you’ll ensure your organization has a metrics-driven quality workflow that is also setup for Continuous Improvement (CI).

At this point, it is also critical to choose the right EQMS solution. Often, decision-makers end up implementing a QMS that serves as a system of record for all quality-related data. These solutions are not set up for collaboration, decision-making and engagement around quality, and these systems are often not connected to the rest of the organization’s workflow. The need of the hour is to adopt a truly integrated quality management solution, that seamlessly fits in with the ERP, CRM, product design and management workflow, etc.

The Role of an EQMS in Improving Business Performance, Risk Management – in Addition to Compliance

There are, not one, but many reasons why every business needs a quality management system. Some of the benefits a quality leader can highlight to the top management to establish a meaningful, proactive, automated quality workflow include:

• Improved Governance, Risk, and Compliance: These are three big tickets that need to be managed and implemented well to avoid litigation due to noncompliance. A cloud-based QMS provides a holistic view of enterprise systems with sufficient controls to mitigate risks in a secure manner. With a more robust approach to the management of documents, audits, inspections, and regulatory filings – there is certainly an improvement (better efficiency and lesser errors) in terms of all GRC processes.
• The Need for a Single Source of Truth along with Analytics: With the globalization of supply chains and access to markets worldwide, a unified view of data helps with business continuity even during disruptions due to internal and external factors. With the right EQMS, leaders and decision-makers across teams including production, engineering, quality, safety, and senior management leaders have a finger on the pulse of all key metrics they need to track. They can also set up personalized dashboards and run analytics on data, to make better decisions.
• Streamlined Management of Change, CAPA Processes with Enhanced Collaboration: Identifying the impact of changes, mitigating risks, initiating root cause analysis, and taking corrective and preventive action becomes simpler with a modern EQMS. With better integration, data visibility and traceability – quality teams are able to collaborate better with other teams including engineering, customer support, production, etc.
• Automation of Management Reviews: By implementing a modern Quality Control Tower, quality leaders are able to bring in visibility and transparency into the end-to-end workflow, thus improving the management review process. It is designed not only to track data and metrics but also the status of action items, tag stakeholders and team members they want to collaborate with on tackling issues or improvement initiatives.

Additionally, having an integrated risk management module is a critical requirement in today’s day and age.

Benefits of a QMS for Different Functions

A QMS enables establishing a culture of quality, where every individual is engaged proactively in quality improvement in their areas of responsibility. Each function can also experience benefits in its area of operations. For instance:

Improved Supplier Management: A cloud-based QMS enables automating the supplier management workflow right from onboarding to sharing documents, ensuring the quality of inputs, to reviews, and reboarding or replacing. It can help mitigate risks and improve supplier performance.

Enhanced Customer Delight: Customer service teams can respond to customer queries and complaints with real-time data to improve satisfaction. Feedback from customers can inform processes upstream and downstream, enabling improvements.

Employee Management: Employee skills and capabilities play a key role in ensuring the quality of the products and services. Training management helps to track employee performance, identify their strengths and weaknesses, and plan and deliver training based on gaps and needs.

Equipment Management: Planned preventive maintenance can reduce unexpected downtimes and minimize disruptions. It can also impact the quality of the product and keep costs for repair low. Timely maintenance helps improve the ROI of the equipment and machinery.

ComplianceQuest QMS for Your Organization

Some of the key ingredients of a successful QMS are the alignment of all teams towards a common quality and business goal. It needs all stakeholders to be engaged in the quality process and contribute meaningfully through specific inputs. It needs the business to be mature and ready to embrace the culture of quality and automate the quality processes.

By providing data in real-time, it helps with capturing trends, identifying likely events, and minimizing risks. Being cloud-based, it also enables collaboration and communication between teams across locations and triggers alerts and notifications in case of quality events. By enabling root cause analysis followed by CAPA, it helps businesses address the main cause for quality events and prevent a recurrence.

An integrated document management solution helps with the entire document workflow from creation, archiving, version control, reviews, approvals, and removals based on regulatory needs. It also makes it easy to access documents during audits and inspections, which are also automated through the system. Training management keeps the employees up to date with the quality needs and improves compliance.

The 7 key processes of the ComplianceQuest solution, built conforming to the ISO standards, include:

• Nonconformance / Deviations / OOS
• CAPA
• Equipment
• Inspections
• Workforce Digitalization
• Risk and Compliance
• Supplier Management

By covering workflows end-to-end, it ensures quality at every stage of the product lifecycle while enabling employees to respond proactively by empowering them with data and insights.

To know more about the ComplianceQuest EQMS and how it can help your business improve the overall quality and business performance, visit: https://www.compliancequest.com/quality/

You can also schedule a demo with us: https://www.compliancequest.com/online-demo/