Everyday QUALITY

The advent of ISO 9001:2015 has brought about big changes in how organizations view their Quality Management Systems. These changes have shifted the landscape of quality. Now, everyone is responsible for quality, from top management to middle managers, plant people, machine operators, back-office personnel. Everyone has a part to play.

All organizations go from running ad-hoc with minimum standards and audits in place, to having a management system with flow-on effects for the entire organization, and being ISO certified brings huge benefits to your company. Your products and processes improve, relationships prosper, and your business grows.

To have this effective culture, one must change from within. To effectively achieve and fully implement this type of cultural change, organizations need to align their strategy, business processes, and product and process quality to create a clearly defined Strategic Plan that outlines the actions needed to achieve the right goals and to effectively communicate those goals to the entire organization. The Strategic Plan needs to put everyone on the same page towards managing, achieving, and maintaining quality every day.

For most companies, developing an effective Strategic Plan is not a simple thing. It takes time and effort and it takes critical insight from all stakeholders into how the organization operates on a day-to-day basis so that you can see where improvement needs to occur tomorrow. Companies have seen the importance of truly understanding organizational strengths and weaknesses. As part of the Strategic Planning process, organizations must identify their Key Success Factors (KSFs). What functions, activities, or business practices are valued and demanded by market conditions and customer needs? Once KSFs are defined, the Key Performance Indicators can be developed. These indicate an organization’s progress toward a desirable outcome. They monitor the implementation and effectiveness of an organization strategies. One should determine the gap between actual and targeted performance and determine organization effectiveness and operational efficiency. Looking at the ISO 9001:2015 standard, Strategic Direction can be found in several areas such as Clauses 4.1, 5.2, 6.2.1, and 6.2.2 as well as 9.3.

Let us focus on explaining this using three of the most important outcomes of an effective QMS for any business. Firstly, ISO standards improve management. All businesses must continually reflect on and improve their leadership within the organization. It gives senior management the framework for an efficient management process. An improved management process creates organization and structure which improves relationships with management and creates a happier workforce. Responsibility starts with upper management a clear dedication to improving processes and communication within the business. Secondly, ISO standards improve employee engagement. Employees develop a sense of ownership over their part of improving quality management systems. This added responsibility within the organization helps all employees to grow their sense of belonging and value. Lastly, ISO standards improve your customer service and business relationships. When a quality management system is implemented within a workforce, managers listen to employees, employees seek out the best way to do things and a relationship is created from continual improvement. Improving customer service leads to loyal customers. It is the bread and butter of any successful business.

In short, we can ensure these outcomes only through

QUALITY MINDSET that will ensure that whatever we provide (whether it be a physical product or a service) is aligned with the requirements of the customer/stakeholder.

UNIFIED DIRECTION that will guide the organization to a seamless, unambiguous goal

ACTION ADVOCACY that focuses on getting things done right - determining what can be done to mitigate risks and correct mistakes.

LEADERSHIP that is uncompromising in its commitment towards quality and making certain that everyone is aware of this.

IMPROVEMENT CULTURE that focuses on raising the bar for the organization.

TEAMWORK CULTURE that ensures collaboration towards a seamless system.

YIELDING RESULTS that can be measured and relied upon.

Everyday LIFE

The question now is how we practice everyday quality in our everyday life?

While we focus on a good quality of life, what is value-added to an individual will vary from person to person depending on their priorities but bottom-line on the different lessons learned that life set us. For instance, personally, things that add value to my life are health, peace of mind, a good family, and of course financials. In other words, whatever I try to manage will revolve around these aspects and applying the quality tools that can eventually manage and improve their outputs.

So adapting a PDCA (plan-do-check-act) approach will trigger my life to a lot of inspirations and set the quality tools that will continually improve the aspects in my life. Life is made up of processes starting from getting up early in the morning, doing exercises, getting ready for work, going to work, taking care of personal commitments, etc. Each gave us enlightenment to struggle on and setting the hardship and challenges to an edge that will build quality and improvement.

One of the clearer goals that you have to take into consideration is the focus. Life offers us so many challenges yet so few opportunities will get us into. The final outcome in life is not the sum of all we did but rather the things that we have taken into concentration, as well as to drive our every situation in our life. Either an emergency, an opportunity, a decisive decision is our critical priority to walk on and move on.

Finally, the main point in our life and which is the goal is excellence. Institutionalizing the practice of the above quality tools, either the why method, the risk analysis, the Pareto Principle or the 5S will effectively gain our full systems into an efficient way and that is proven to result in continual improvement. Aristotle famously quoted Quality is not act, it is a habit. The key is

L- Lessons Learned

I- Inspirations

F- Focus

E- Excellence

Everyday Quality, Everyday Life.