Failure can often teach you more than success can. Like Thomas Edison said, 'I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work'. The concept of total quality management focuses on continuous improvement and this, along with the embedding of a quality culture, is the single most useful focus for framing quality management strategy.Hopefully, your organisation won't need to go around the mountain 10,000 times until you get the right result. After all, you're organisation doesn't need to invent the wheel, you're not even reinventing the wheel (or lightbulb as Edison was attempting).
One of the best ways of succeeding in the quality of your goods and services is by learning where other companies went wrong, so you don't have to - and if you're going to look at failure, why not look at two of the biggest quality failures of all time?
I give you:
1. The Samsung Galaxy Note 7 Debacle:
and;
2. The 2008 Global Financial Crisis:
These were two of the biggest Quality Fails of a generation. In the video below, we analyse what these failures tell us and briefly point to these four specific areas of attention that are key to creating a a quality culture. These are:
- A Quality Control Strategy - this is most applicable to your supply chain - know your supply chain by mapping out the processes and modelling improvements
- A Failure Prevention Strategy - create tougher quality controls that pick up potential risks early before they turn into massive problems
- A Process Improvement Focus - model improvements in regards to your quality strategy, implement improvements and test the results
- Cultural Improvement Focus -quality doesn't change unless everyone is on the train going in the same direction. This is the most important step in organisation-wide quality improvement.
Develop A Quality Management Strategy: 2 Failures You Can Learn From:
Another step towards developing a quality culture in your organisation would be to download this white paper from ISO expert Mark Braham on achieving ISO 9001:2015:
Related Articles:
Continuous Improvement: How do I create a culture of continuous improvement?
Managing Risk in Business and Avoiding Quality Failure?The Top 10 things your Quality Management System must deliver