What is Quality Management (and why it needs to shift from reactive to proactive)

Is your organization looking to enhance customer satisfaction, reduce costs, or grow with new products?  Do you want to know the difference between Quality Assurance, Control, Planning, and Improvement?

In this video, we’ll discuss Quality Management, its key components, and their relationship.  This will help you understand the benefits of focusing more on proactive quality and less on reactive quality.   

Quality Management is a key success factor to ensure customer satisfaction and achieve operational excellence.  It provides a systematic approach that helps ensure products and services consistently meet or exceed customer expectations at the lowest total costs. 

Consistency in performance to customer expectations increases customer trust and loyalty, fostering long-term customer relationships.  Rigor in quality processes mitigates risks early in the production cycle, and robust processes have fewer defects, waste, and rework.

Quality Management spans various departments within an organization, including Operations, Supply Chain, Continuous Improvement, Engineering, Technology, and of course, Quality.

It can be categorized into 4 integrated, overlapping, and closely related essential components:  quality planning, quality assurance, quality control, and quality improvement.  These are not separate components, but rather cumulative.

Quality Planning is at the forefront, defining the roadmap downstream.  Products and processes are meticulously designed, standards are set to meet customer expectations, and lessons learned from past experiences are acted on.  Common practices here include Failure Mode and Effects Analysis, Advanced Product Quality Planning, and Quality Function Deployment.  It provides a proactive approach as an input into quality assurance. This proactively mitigates potential risks and avoids unnecessary costs. 

Quality Assurance is like the guarding of planned quality.  It involves continuous monitoring and control, checking and driving adherence to standards focused on the processes and the inputs going into those processes.  Common practices here include various forms of Process Audits, Measurement System Analysis, Control Plans, and Statistical Process Control.

Quality Control complements assurance and serves as the last line of defense, more focused on the product than on the process.  Encompassing inspections, tests, and corrective actions to rectify deviations, Quality Control maintains the desired quality levels and prevents defective products from reaching customers.    Common practices here include various types of manual, semi-automatic, or automatic inspections and tests, containment, and disposition processes.

Quality Improvement drives various types of improvement initiatives and projects to correct or enhance existing processes.  This is an iterative process that prioritizes opportunities according to the total cost of quality, and drives continuous enhancements, ensuring that organizations learn from mistakes and drive proactive improvements all the way upstream.  Common practices include Corrective Action and Preventive Action process, Root-Cause Analysis, A3 Problem-Solving, 8D, Kaizen, Just-Do-It, and DMAIC.

What about Quality Management Systems?

Although the use of this terminology varies in industry, Quality Management Systems provide the needed structure and tools for effective quality management and the connection to business objectives.  QMS integrates the various metrics, standards, processes, procedures, documentation, and software tools that connect the four essential components and allow for consistency, transparency, and accountability.  Common practices include compliance with industry standards, such as ISO or other international or local standards, as well as software tools to aid in documenting processes and enabling communication.

There is a journey to excellence in Quality Management.

Organizations that want to lead in Quality Management are those that can establish an effective proactive approach.  Improvements drive the organization to focus more on Quality Assurance and Planning rather than relying on Quality Control and reactive improvement.  Focusing upstream builds quality from the start, preventing downstream firefighting. 

The proactive approach also allows the resources to increase their scope and reduce the total cost of quality.  Resources can use their skills to not only reduce the costs of complaints but also reduce waste and scrap costs, which can be significant for industrial organizations. 

The proactive approach in Quality Planning can also focus on optimizing material usage and product design, again adding more value to the organization.

If your organization would like to be more proactive, these are a few keys to success.

• First, habits need to change. Quality resources may have been focused for years on Quality Control, and now must embrace a mindset change. They often need to pave their way to being more proactive, by improving their root cause problem-solving skills and having the desire to grow in their career.
• To accelerate this journey, the use of technology, especially in assurance and control, can help free up these resources.
• And lastly, teamwork and cross-functional teams can help break silos between Quality departments, Operations, Engineering, and other departments I already mentioned.

To learn more about how to achieve this or about Quality Management, Problem-Solving, and Operational Excellence, we encourage you to visit Belt Course dot com.  Find the link in the description.  This video was made in collaboration with Sebastian Alonso, from Belt Course.