Best Practices to ensure Quality Excellence in 2022

At ComplianceQuest, we published a Whitepaper titled ‘Top Five Guiding Principles for a Next-Generation EQMS’. In the paper, we highlight why a truly modern EQMS is a basic requirement to run a data-driven quality management process.

Based on our conversations with both quality leaders and executive management, the only way to improve quality performance is to have a well-documented quality excellence framework and then run a metrics-driven process to ensure the necessary numbers are met.

Are you looking for ways to streamline and automate your quality processes? Looking for a truly modern EQMS platform that helps you embrace quality excellence?

What you need is an EQMS platform like ComplianceQuest that is scalable and flexible with data at the core.

Read this paper to find out more

Introduction: Going Beyond Lean and Six Sigma

Almost a decade ago, McKinsey Quarterly published an article titled ‘Lean and Six Sigma – Why can’t we be friends?’. The primary recommendation from the article was this: Enterprises need to clearly choose between Lean or Six Sigma for their “business improvement” process but also take a holistic view that’ll ensure best practices from both approaches come into the picture.

The Lean concept was born from the Toyota Production System (TPS) and focuses on improvements in frontline processes and quality improvements in manufacturing through processes like 5S, Kanban, and Kaizen. It was deeply focused on reducing “wasteful processes” to make systems more efficient.

On the other hand, Six Sigma is more statistical with a clearly defined execution process and usage of analytical models to “reduce variations” in often-repeated processes and therefore in the final output. Motorola and General Electric were pioneers of using Six Sigma to bring in high-levels of efficiency into business operations.

But let’s fast forward to today’s interconnected, complex world.

Quality and operational excellence frameworks like Lean and Six Sigma are simply not enough by themselves.

As this article in Quartz points out, the smart enterprise of the future will need a quality system that is agile, flexible, connected, and data-driven. It should not only drive the execution of quality processes but help future-oriented teams innovate and move forward.

It should empower teams to learn and pick up new skills through training, quickly navigate between supplier, customer, and internal operational dashboards and generate insights from both quality and operational metrics. It should be designed to also keep tabs on supplier quality, ongoing training, agile feedback loop from complaints data, etc.

At ComplianceQuest, we’re building a next-generation EQMS to help our customers embrace Quality Excellence.

What does Quality Excellence mean operationally?

To us at ComplianceQuest, it is a quality system that is placed at the core of all your operations – internal, supplier side, customer side, and all other partners/stakeholders. It has to be agile, effective, easy to implement, easy to track, and, most importantly, drive continuous improvement.

Businesses today are facing the challenge of globalization of markets, a widely distributed supply chain, increased competition, demanding customers, and stringent as well as varying regulations in the markets they operate in.

Additionally, they need to gear up for the next phase of digital transformation, taking advantage of emerging technologies like AI and advanced analytics to aid innovation and growth.

Businesses find that their legacy quality management systems are insufficient to cope with the demands from multiple directions. What they need is a versatile, next-generation quality management system not only for improved efficiency and effectiveness but also to enable advancement in functionality to boost innovation, growth, and quality metrics.

In the future, a holistic, truly connected quality system will be at the center of operational excellence.

A Grand View Research of the trends in the global quality management software market shows that this need for “better performance, customer satisfaction, and competitiveness” will drive the next phase of growth in the EQMS sector. It is expected to grow at a CAGR of 9.8 percent in the next five years to touch USD 13.9 billion by 2025 in terms of revenue.

It is important to emphasize here that data needs to be at the core of a next-generation EQMS. In fact, your enterprise EQMS can serve as the gold source of all quality data and key metrics.

The Document Management System in your EQMS will ensure version control of all key documents, the Supplier Management module will drive supplier quality metrics and your EQMS’ dashboard can serve as a tracker of all key metrics like say, supplier quality or customer happiness scores.

A cloud-based system is also designed to be agile, flexible, and scalable, making it easy to drive continuous improvement. It also has the necessary APIs to connect with other ERP and CRM systems, ensuring continuity of processes.

Simply put, a next-generation quality platform fits in well with the rest of your digital ecosystem. It’ll become as mainstream as how companies use an ERP or CRM. Every enterprise will adopt one.

The Core Quality Promise any EQMS Must Deliver

When we use the phrase ‘Core Quality Promise’ we refer to the following three outcomes for our enterprise customers:

The entire system is designed to serve the end-users of our enterprise clients. For instance, in the medical device space, the quality system must ensure that product quality lies at the core of the whole device and does its job as expected. While regulatory compliance and quality requirements are all critical, the real value of a proven quality system is that there’s trust that the final product works as expected, on an ongoing basis. If there’s an issue, the quality system must spot the issue ahead of time. A risk-integrated approach ensures that the whole QMS workflow is truly proactive to mitigate potential risks. Our product management team has designed the system by ‘working backward’ from the end goal: i.e., starting with the specific needs of end-users and designing features to cater to these needs.
It is designed to deliver customer success. You can rely on our system to drive your end-to-end quality and compliance agenda, at all times, across all processes.
It is also designed to enable business decision-making. With data at the core of our quality process, it makes it easy to drive insights from quality data. Also, Compliance Quest leverages Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning/AI capabilities to enable predictive quality and give quality leaders the ability to make data-driven decisions.

Here, we list a few capabilities of the ComplianceQuest product, just to give you a glimpse of how we use cutting-edge technology to deliver on our core quality promise:

Issue Triage: Identify the next best action/recommendation.
Create wizard-based helpers: Triage, Investigation, Root Cause Analysis, etc.
Enable process automation based on prescribed rules: Trending and Statistical Thresholds, Nonconformance Trends.
Use NLP and AI for Complaints Triage & Risk Predictions.
Provide dashboards for several roles:Unlimited access, Role Specific, Departmental, Site, Regional and Corporate level (Quality, Complaints, and Supplier).
Custom Reports:Built-in Reporting Engine, Simple to Create and Use. Can integrate with third-party data analytics tools such as Qlik, Tableau, Micro strategy, Power BI, etc. through Native Salesforce Data Adapter.

In the next few blogs as part of this series, we’ll cover the following topics:

Role of Data and Metrics
How the EQMS system must enable Continuous Improvement (CI) of the quality process
Using AI to drive speed, agility, and better decision-making across the whole workflow

The Quality Excellence Checklist

Tick off the following checklist to ensure your enterprise is doing whatever it takes to embrace Quality Excellence

Do you have an EQMS that seamlessly integrates with ERP, CRM, and other business systems with your quality workflow?
Does it have integrated risk management?
Can the EQMS be customized as per your business requirements and process flow?
Can the EQMS scale as your business and operations scale?
Is it modularized? Let us say, you automate only Document Management, Audit Management, and CAPA today, but want to add Management Review Automation later – Is it possible?
Is your EQMS the single source of truth for all quality data?
Does your EQMS speed up decision-making by using analytics and AI?
Does it enable ease of regulatory compliance and any submissions to regulatory bodies?
Is it easy to collaborate with stakeholders from multiple teams?
Does it support multiple languages, especially if you have operations globally?
Most importantly, as a quality leader or quality analyst, does it make your life easier?