When everybody in your organization is on the same page with your quality management program, things will run smoothly. Yes, this even includes the executives. Do you recall Dr. W. Edwards Deming’s 14 points for total quality management? If you don’t remember, I’ll refresh your memory on one; No. 14: put everybody in the company to work accomplishing the transformation. These points are as solid now as they were when Deming presented them in the 1980s.
Involve Executives in the Quality Management Process
A way to ensure that quality is on the minds of executives is to include them in the process. Using your process is a great way to do two very important things: explain to executives their new role in quality and communicate how to make quality a culture within the organization driven by them as leaders. Start by creating a risk governance team that includes at least one executive member to review and enforce the risk methodology. As with any other processes, continuously look for ways to improve the risk management process and evolve the methodology for your organization. With executive involvement, they will see the value and contribute to the process. Executive visibility and participation are key and a great way to drive quality toward operational excellence. To help paint this vision for executives, we need to show them the value of quality. Using IATF as an example, you can leverage these new requirements to bring your maturity model to the executive’s attention and together, create a process to follow.
The ultimate goal of the enterprise should be that quality is inherent and is built into the process that is followed every day by everyone. This vision of using recommended quality practices as an advantage has been reviewed by LNS Research. Their data has shown that operating income of organizations using these recommended practices, on average, improved by $10 million per $1 billion. This kind of improvement should be more than enough to have executives get on board with quality in your organization.
Speak the Language of the Executives
It’s great to shoot for the goal of implementing best practices to achieve operational excellence, but what am I comparing my organization to? Getting interest from executives is one step, the next is showing a comparison between your organization’s current state and the recommended best practices. Try communicating this information via a maturity model. A maturity model is a quick way to visually identify where your organization currently stands versus the industry view of operational excellence. By identifying your current position on the model, this helps to visualize your starting point, and use the rest of the model to identify your journey to operational excellence.
Find the Right QMS for Your Organization
The final piece is looking for the justification of a manual or paper-based QMS versus an automated solution that provides the recommended best practices out of the box. A paper-based QMS requires many people to provide any value and is still very prone to errors. These inefficiencies end up being very costly. An automated QMS removes many of the manual inefficiencies, so an organization actually gets a reduction in costs going with an enterprise quality management system. Learn about how QAD Cloud QMS can help you with the rules and regulations of your industry, reduce paperwork and easily share information throughout your organization.
I recently spoke on this subject at the 2017 AIAG Quality Summit with a presentation on the importance of quality as a step toward operational excellence.
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This method of idea generation uses different questions that have been also effective.