How to Develop a Quality Strategy/6 Advantages of Quality Control

What qualifies as an acceptable level of quality for your organisation is accordingly ultimately a question for your stakeholders. Stakeholders being anyone who has an interest in the success of what your organisation does.

Customers will be the most important group of stakeholders for the majority of businesses, but investors, employees, suppliers and members of our wider society are stakeholders too. Delivering an acceptable level of quality in your organisation means knowing who your stakeholders are, understanding what their needs are and meeting those needs (or even better, exceeding expectations), both now and in the future.

Learning from Quality Failure

While quality and quality management are sometimes hard to define, we all know what quality failure looks like.

Image from: barrieaircraft.com

A quick Google of ‘quality failure’, immediately brings up numerous examples:

• J. P. Morgan’s loss of $6.2 billion in 2012 as a result of inadequate internal controls and the gross misconduct of two traders

• Boeing’s launch of 787 Dreamliner plagued with delays and problems which doubled the number of estimated years for development from 4 to 8 years and a cost of £32 billion from an estimated £6 billion

• Toyota’s 2010 quality failures impacting their reputation as a quality leader because of removable floor mats that caused the accelerator to stick and led to 52 deaths and a recall of 9 million cars in the US.

For more on quality failures and their cost please read: What is the cost of quality failure? 

So how do we avoid quality failure and provide a quality product or service to our customers? One that meets or even exceeds their expectations?

Align your Corporate and Quality Strategies

Too often in the past quality has been seen as non-strategic and not core to the real business of the organisation - perhaps even an add-on. 

• strong governance to define the organisation's aims and translate them into action,
• a robust systems of assurance to make sure things stay on track and
• a culture of continuous improvement

To have any chance of achieving these, quality must sit right at the heart of your organisation and your quality strategy must be totally aligned and integrated with your organisation's corporate strategies.

How to Achieve Robust Quality Management

Achieving a robust systems of assurance to make sure things stay on track, requires your Quality Management System to also be right at the heart of your business extending (well beyond the quality department) organisation-wide.

Indeed, with ISO 9001:2015 the core requirements for a complying Quality Management System are that it is strategic, central to the core business of the organisation and relevant to all employees.

This is underpinned by certification to ISO 9001:2015 requiring the passing of an audit which checks that your Quality Management System delivers on the Seven Quality Management Principles.

These Quality Management Principles (QMPs) are:

• QMP 1 – Customer focus: Meeting - and exceeding - your customers’ current and future needs is the
  primary focus of quality management.
  
  
• QMP 2 – Leadership: Having a unified direction and mission that comes from strong leadership is essential
  in promoting the right culture.
  
  
• QMP 3 – Engagement of people: Competent, empowered and engaged people at all levels of your
  organisation.
  
  
• QMP 4 – Process approach: Understanding activities as processes that link together and function as a system
  to yield more effective and efficient results.
  
  
• QMP 5 – Improvement: Successful organisations have an ongoing improvement focus.
  
  
• QMP 6 – Evidence-based decision making: Ensuring your decisions are based on the analysis and evaluation of data is more likely to produce the desired result.
  
  
• QMP 7 – Relationship management: Identifying the important relationships you have with interested parties such as your suppliers – and setting out a plan to manage them – will drive sustained success.

 For more detail on how to achieve the ISO 9001:2015 quality standard please download our expert guide to ISO 9001:2015.

Whether or not you take an ISO quality certification approach however, the most effective way to align your business and quality strategies is to put your quality management system firmly at the heart of your organisation.

A Culture of Continuous Improvement

A culture of continuous improvement can quite hard to achieve, given that it is as much about changing hearts and minds as is it about actions. There are however just 3 vital ingredients:

• Senior Management Commitment

• Employee Involvement 

• Ongoing Communication

All of which need to be built on an obvious link between quality and the strategic goals of the organisation.

For more on this please read: How do I Create a Culture of Continuous Improvement?

6 Advantages of Quality Control