Quality Management 2.0 Blog

As publisher of Quality Digest, I often take a somewhat dispassionate view of process and performance errors. After all, our typical reader is a quality professional whose job, in part, is to figure out why something went wrong and prevent it from occurring again.

We are all doing triple the amount of work that we need to do, and most of us don’t even know it!  At the same time, we are making things more difficult for everyone around us.  The saddest part is that we’ve been doing it for a long time.

The Business Case for taking EQMS beyond NC/CAPA

Depending on the culture, size, industry and the challenges that you are facing, your organization focuses on employees, customers, or business optimization and leverage various processes, tools, metrics and controls during the implementation of their Quality Management programs. This study, conducted by the Aberdeen Group, will allow your organization to benchmark itself against peers and Best-in-Class companies according to its ability to provide safe and on-spec products to the marketplace and track these products across the extended value chain.

As much as having a solid Quality Management System (QMS) a major compliment to that system is its ability to provide a strong level of security.   Security is a major component to rolling your system.  It goes beyond who can create, work, review and approve documents.  Once the data is loaded you are now faced with the challenge to protect that data by securing information that may be proprietary sensitive or carry with it some legal reason that it must remain secure and for only designated eyes.

The supply chain manager depends on a presumption of quality from his suppliers. But what can he do to evaluate his suppliers even before he has a track record from working with them? The automotive industry has developed a tool that helps suppliers provide their customers with an assurance of their ability to meet supply chain performance commitments. The tool, with the odd handle of "MMOG/LE", is a standardized self-assessment survey made up of 206 questions that a supplier would complete and provide to a customer. (Right now, Chrysler, Ford, and GM require MMOG/LE from their suppliers.)

A few weeks ago, my guest post on IBS’s Quality Management 2.0 Blog highlighted some of LNS Research’s recent survey results. It showed the connection between quality management objectives and the measurement of the cost of quality. Interestingly, our research also shows that companies measuring the cost of quality are more likely to invest in and leverage a Quality Management Solution.

In today’s fast paced business environment, it is has become harder and harder for those concerned with quality management and service delivery related activities to keep track of all of their responsibilities as well as their required tasks without something falling through the cracks.   The days of the yellow sticky note no longer suffice as a tool for us to organize the myriad of activities we are not only responsible to complete but also monitor and oversee.  Our never ending attempts to remain focused appear to be futile in that we are growing ever busier and become easily derailed by sidebar activities and impromptu scheduled events.  One advantage of having IBS software to manage quality processes is its ability to organize and streamline activities to address just these problems.

Rebalancing the Product Complexity Equation

Here's a quick example of how easy it is to change the messages sent by IBS software. Suppose you want to change how the email-message that is sent when a Training Record is coming up for renewal. For this example, suppose you would like to indicate in the Subject line the name of the person whose record this refers to.