Top 5 Challenges Quality Managers Worry About

In today’s highly competitive, digitally-powered world, quality managers no longer operate in silos. There is a constant dialogue among all stakeholders including quality, manufacturing, procurement, customer service, and senior management teams. Leaders from across business functions are today working together and collaborating to keep pace with the latest trends and technologies.

While collaboration and interconnectedness are critical, the buck stops with the quality leader when it comes to measuring and improving quality metrics.

Quality teams around the world are striving to build robust Quality Management Systems, prevent failure, meet compliance requirements, reduce costs, and drive up efficiency. Quality is no longer about reacting to failure. It is about building a preventive and proactive culture of quality across the organization – so it can become a key differentiating factor when it comes to delivering quality, and therefore customer delight.

At ComplianceQuest, we have interacted with quality teams at 900+ locations around the globe. Based on numerous conversations with quality managers, we have come to believe that quality teams from diverse sectors are worried about five major factors, and a lot of their workflows and processes are designed to tackle these challenges.

Factor #1: Customer Complaints

The last thing a quality manager wants to hear is a customer complaint, especially if it is because of the failure of the quality management. Of course, when a customer complaint gets reported, it is critical to act swiftly and take corrective and preventive measures. A cloud-based EQMS with a well-designed complaint management solution will help drive efficiency into the process of handling complaints. Ideally, the complaint management solution must integrate with other EQMS systems, including CAPA, audit management, and risk management. It must also integrate with the CRM system.

The key: There’s one aspect that all quality managers want to avoid. It is the risk of the same type of complaint coming in repeatedly. Your quality workflow must be designed for conducting root cause analysis with efficiency, and the effectiveness of preventive measures taken must be easy to track and follow through.

Factor #2: Penalties/Fines or Product Recall due to Lack of Regulatory Compliance

In sectors like drug discovery and medical devices, the biggest risk revolves around the failure of regulatory compliance. This often leads to product recall and/or heavy fines and penalties. For quality and compliance leaders, it is crucial to stay on top of evolving regulatory requirements and design processes to ensure all steps are taken to ensure compliance.

The key: Using data and analytics, supported with the right dashboards, will ensure quality leaders have a finger on the pulse of all necessary regulatory requirements. Taking the effort to invest in an EQMS and designing a robust workflow is absolutely essential. Regulatory fines can make a serious dent on both brand value and financial performance. Optimize your QMS to avoid regulatory risk at all costs.

Factor #3: Reduce/Eliminate Nonconforming Products

Identifying and managing product and process nonconformance and eliminating its cause is critical to an organization’s quality system. This is especially pertinent in the stringent FDA and ISO environments, where a nonconforming product, material, or component could lead to costly rework, or worse, a product recall. For any quality leader one of the most important goals is to identify and act on a nonconformance before it leaves the organization and reaches a customer.

The key: Using data and continuous improvement (CI) approaches to ensure quality issues do not leave the company. Take corrective action and preventive action before it leaves the four walls of your organization.

Factor #4: Improving Supplier Quality

Managing your suppliers today can be a major challenge, whether you’re in manufacturing, automotive, aerospace, energy, or highly regulated industries like life sciences. There is often very little visibility into your suppliers’ processes and Quality Management System until it reaches your enterprise. The key is to engage in a two-way process with your suppliers – especially the critical ones – to establish a partnership mindset towards quality. Think of your suppliers as an extension of your own organization’s manufacturing workflow. As a quality manager, it is critical to have this visibility and transparency of all key quality events across the supply chain.

The key: Focus on supplier program and performance management to ensure your suppliers can deliver as per your quality and compliance standards.

Factor #5: Reducing Cost of Quality (CoQ)

The cost of poor quality (COPQ) includes all costs associated with poor quality products or services. Generally, this is put into three buckets: appraisal costs or the costs of evaluating if a product meets quality standards; internal failure costs or quality-related costs incurred before the product reaches customers; and external failure costs, or quality-related costs incurred after the product reaches customers.

The key: The only way for a quality manager to drive down CoQ is by embracing automation and digital transformation. Using a cloud-based EQMS like ComplianceQuest will drive efficiency and continuous improvement and innovation into your quality workflow.

At ComplianceQuest, we have built our EQMS on the basis of five guiding principles:

• Principle #1: Core Quality Promise: Enabling critical business decision making
• Principle #2: User Experience: Simple, seamless, and consistent
• Principle #3: Data at its Core: Single source of truth
• Principle #4: Standardization and Flexibility: Modular, cloud-based, best practices driven, and capable of being tailored
• Principle #5: Continued Improvement: Across quality, business process, systems, design, and people

Our entire suite of solutions is designed to make life easier for a quality manager. Request a demo and find out how we can help you get rid of your worries: https://www.compliancequest.com/online-demo