Here’s Why Your Organization Needs a Next-Gen Management Review Solution for Effective Quality & Safety Management

Recently, ComplianceQuest presented a webinar on running effective management reviews for quality and safety management.

By performing a comprehensive management review of both your Quality Management System (QMS) and Safety Management System (SMS), your company’s leadership gets a better understanding of what works, what doesn’t, where new problems are emerging, and where targets are not being met. Ideally, management reviews are conducted by involving various stakeholders across manufacturing, operations, customer success, supply chain leaders, R&D teams, etc.

In sync with the requirements of standards such as ISO 9000:2015, ISO 14001:2015, and ISO 45001:2018, there is a need to harmonize your business systems (such as ERP, CRM, PLM) and your QHSE (quality, health, safety and environment management system) workflows.

For management reviews to become truly effective, it is important that there is data visibility and orchestrated flow of information across people, processes and systems.

In this post, we highlight the following aspects:

• Disadvantages of a traditional management review (without next-generation technology)
• Regulatory requirements (with respect to how management reviews must be conducted)
• The role of a next-generation management review solution

Why a Traditional Management Review Process Does NOT Work

The objective of a management review is to review the “current state” of your organization’s quality and safety management systems. During the management review, leaders work with the respective quality and safety teams and analyze key metrics. This includes KPIs related to recalls, quality events, safety events, incident rates, systemic issues, audit results, feedback, risks, open issues, etc.

Typically, a management review meeting includes:

• Analysis of all key data and metrics (both quality and safety related)
• Evaluation of management system effectiveness (both QMS and EHS)
• Review of Continuous Improvement (CI) initiatives
• Assignment of corrective actions or CI to improve QMS effectiveness
• Flow of quality data and information across key collaborators and stakeholders
• Action management to monitor, track and progress of all tasks

Are your management review meeting minutes complete? In this document, we offer a free checklist to ensure complete minutes!

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Data: The Driving Force of Management Reviews

At the core of the review process is data. Therefore, conducting a management review without the right technology platform is inefficient – primarily because real-time data is not easily accessible.

Evidently, it can take up to two weeks to prepare reports (after gathering data) for a management review meeting. This delay in report preparation affects the quality of data with a direct impact on the quality of insights gathered, decision-making and outcomes.

With global operations and supply chains, it has become a laborious process to include leaders and managers from different business units across the globe to identify trends, consolidate findings from previous reviews to evaluate performance, which is an essential requirement for management reviews.

Categorically, there are three areas where the management review process faced challenges — compliance, productivity and competitive advantage:

Compliance

• Being audit ready for internal audits, surveillance audits, or surprise inspections
• Increased compliance risk due to manual follow-ups
• Inefficient findings due to disconnected ‘source of truth’ rather than a single source of truth

Productivity

• Disconnected systems are used to prepare, perform, and follow up on management review-related activities.
• It is a time-consuming process to prepare reports and dashboards for management review meetings from siloed systems and repositories.
• There is also an administrative burden placed on the quality, safety and environment management team lead to capture and track all the data.

Competitive advantage

• Considering management review as an activity for compliance and not as an activity for competitive advantage
• Lack of process optimization as it is not considered a core competency

ISO Guidance for Conducting Effective Management Reviews

The three ISO standards, ISO 9000:2015, ISO 14001:2015, and ISO 45001:2018, focus on Continuous Improvement (CI). From a compliance standpoint, periodic quality, safety, and environmental audits evaluate the performance of the management systems and compare them against the pre-defined objectives to drive improvement. To meet the CI requirement of these ISO standards, management must:

• Review regularly to ensure suitability, adequacy, and effectiveness
• Review QHSE objectives and if they are being achieved
• Understand the status of actions from prior reviews
• Review performance and trends
• Ascertain internal and external issues + customer satisfaction
• Evaluate conformity of products and services
• Review nonconformities and corrective actions, audit results, supplier performance, incidents
• Examine the effectiveness of efforts to address risks
• Search opportunities for improvement
• Make changes to the management system
• Understand adequacy of resources

Management Reviews with a Next-gen Solution from ComplianceQuest

A next-generation management review is about really being able to tie in and tap into the different systems that an organization has, such as EQMS, EHS, ERP, or human capital management, and bringing all the data and tracking into a single tool that everyone has access to. And most importantly, make sure that all analysis is being done with real-time data, using analytics and AI to gather relevant and meaningful insights.

With the CQ Management Review Solution, you can have comprehensive control over how management reviews are conducted to not only meet regulatory requirements but also ensure all key stakeholders have a clear picture with regards to risks and impacts and can also collaborate effectively to improve the overall quality and safety performance.

With our solution, the entire process becomes streamlined providing a formal review and record of the system status, progress towards objectives, and a method to change the quality or safety system as required by the company.

With the ComplianceQuest Management Review solution, quality and safety leaders can efficiently address and assign responsibilities for follow-up actions, track progress, and prepare all documents for standards and regulatory audits in the future.

CQ’s Management Review Solution is designed to make life easy for both the executive management and quality/safety leaders. Specifically, it offers the following benefits:

• Help organizations with their management reviews, track new and open action items from previous meetings and easily manage attendance.
• Track participants and their attendance for traceability and compliance
• Define the objective, agenda, and keep track of minutes and decisions while providing easy access in the organization
• Assign actions as needed for additional follow-up
• Attach supporting information for future reference
• Easily schedule recurring meetings and track open actions from previous meetings.
• Synchronize events with Outlook calendar

CQ’s Management Review Solution also offers AI-enabled Quality and Safety Control Towers. The control towers offer four distinct advantages, from a management review perspective:

• Data Visibility: Visibility of all quality and safety events, insights, action plans and outcomes
• Notification Alerts: Users receive notifications based on SLAs and lead times tagged to all action plans. Collaborate with relevant stakeholders to resolve with agility
• Decision-support: Executives take actions within the Quality Control Tower and Safety Control Tower. Users also make decisions based on recommendations from AI-enabled intelligent agents
• Autonomous: Overtime, your Quality Control Tower and Safety Control Tower can take autonomous decisions on quality actions to be taken without human intervention

To know more about ComplianceQuest’s Management Review Solution, schedule a demo here: https://www.compliancequest.com/lp/management-review/