When it comes to goal setting many people tend to sell themselves short, choosing goals that are easily attainable rather than ones that are a bit of a reach. This isn’t the worst strategy for personal development, but it doesn’t necessarily help you move forward by leaps and bounds. The same can be said for businesses, and often it's the companies that set expectations noticeably high that are the most innovative and successful at reaching operational excellence.
It’s this type of perspective that’s critical to an impactful enterprise quality management software (EQMS) implementation. If you’re assessing potential vendors for an EQMS that will make marginal improvements to the quality of your products and processes, you can probably expect just that. But if you’re assessing solutions with the end-goal of building a real and attainable competitive advantage, then you’re on a whole other level.
Last week, we started this four-part series on building a business case for EQMS with an overview on how to develop a comprehensive view of your current quality capabilities. This week, we’ll continue the discussion by diving into how to choose your ideal quality capabilities. You'll use these two sets of capabilities to identify gaps that EQMS can fill to give you that competitive advantage.
Identifying Your Ideal Quality Management Capabilities
There are a number of different areas to inspect when developing a list of ideal quality management capabilities. They typically fall into four buckets: people, processes, technology, and metrics. When you're working with your cross-functional team (as discussed last week), answer the following questions together to get a solid view of what you'd like your quality capabilities to be:
1. What degree of leadership and culture will provide you with the resources needed to manage quality holistically and effectively across the enterprise?
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If most of your quality efforts are done at the site level, it might be time for the role of quality to be elevated. You’ll want to find the right degree of people-oriented resources that should be shared versus those that should remain site-specific. It's often the case that quality initiatives require buy-in from senior leaders and executives, otherwise they fall by the wayside and end up as wasted resources. Identify key players you need support from, what role they should play in quality, and how they can help spread quality culture across the enterprise to make sure your EQMS investment is successful over the long term.
2. Which processes would benefit from being globally standardized and which would benefit from being managed locally?
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EQMS delivers the most benefits when processes are standardized at the global level. This way quality managers and continuous improvement professionals can identify trends in data from across the value chain and have a central platform for communicating and ameliorating best practices related to those processes. For both budgetary and strategic purposes, it’s often best to approach this question by focusing on only those quality software functionalities that will provide synergies to the organization as a whole, not just specific departments. It’s important to remember that additional processes can be rolled out over time, and also particular processes make more sense to manage locally.
3. Are the current quality software systems and data sources across the value chain getting in your way of performance improvements or enabling them?
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In many cases, homegrown and legacy systems aren’t cutting it when it comes to the complexities of today’s products and processes. Think about how you want information to flow from one process to the other and even between value chain nodes. Market-leaders are investing in closed-loop quality management, the concept of enabling collaboration and communication on quality process data and content between different value chain nodes. Consider how your organization might benefit from an IT architecture that supports such activities and document the requirements that would help you realize this.
4. Can your current metrics program provide you with the level of value chain visibility needed to make decisions?
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There are metrics for nearly every activity across the value chain – cost of quality, overall equipment effectiveness, on-time deliveries, scrap/rework rate – but it can be difficult to get actionable intelligence on them. Document which metrics you want to measure, and then identify your desired performance in each. Remember to identify any disparities between the way metrics are measured across regions and sites, and normalize the numbers for this exercise as needed.
Tips for building desired quality state and performance
It’s unrealistic to think that you can achieve all of these requirements in the short term. When documenting your ideal set of requirements across people, processes, technology, and metrics, make sure to sit down with your cross-functional team and prioritize which ones are the most important for your industry as well as your organization specifically.
By focusing initially on immediate pain points – document management, corrective and preventive actions, failure mode and effects analysis, etc. – you can make sure you’re delivering the most value up front. The goal should be to implement a solution that can address the problems you’ve prioritized, and then scale the solution to make an impact on the less immediate issues over time.
Don’t forget to leverage the experiences of your cross-functional team. Because there will be a breadth of knowledge and backgrounds included in this team or quality council, it’s likely that someone else may have used EQMS or some variation of it in the past. Make sure to find out which strategies worked for them in terms of implementation, functionality, and education. The idiosyncrasies of someone else’s success may give you a leg up in your realizing your own.
Next week, we'll continue this conversation, discussing how you can use the documentation of your current quality capabilities and ideal quality requirements to identify gaps that EQMS can fill.
Those are our thoughts on building your ideal quality software requirements. Please share your own experiences in the comments section below.
