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What is quality culture? Perhaps it would be better to replace the word “quality”
with “business” instead. At its core, ISO 9001 is intended to be a business
management system, NOT a quality management system. During my career, I have
always attempted (with varying degrees of success) to move away from the concept
of having a quality department that inadvertently becomes the owner of all quality-
related issues. Quality cannot be the work of only one department within an
organization. Quality thinking should be embedded into a company’s business
culture and day-to-day activities. Every employee must understand the importance
of the work they do and the impact they have on the customer experience.
Working in the automotive safety world really brought this concept home for me.
The work we did actually saved lives, and we made sure that every associate
understood that. I remember listening with great pride as our TS16949 auditor
asked multiple associates in various departments the same question, “What impact
do you have on the quality of the product?” and they got the same response, “If I
get it wrong, someone may die” from everyone. There was ownership of quality
throughout the organization. It was a sign of a healthy “quality/business culture.”
I’ve given a lot of thought to what defines a business culture and have distilled it
down to seven steps:
1. Design for quality from the start - Prevention is the key here. It is far easier
(and cheaper) to build quality into everything you do and design failures out rather
than to try to detect and fix them later.
2. Discipline - Using the right tool(s) at the right time requires a disciplined
approach to continuous improvement.
7. No Heroes - Steps five and six combined with the first four remove the need
for firefighting heroes to save the day. Processes and products have predictable
performance and customer satisfaction is guaranteed.
So if preventative measures are the key and they save the company money, why is
it so hard to put them in place? I believe it is a question of language. Quality
professionals speak the language of CpK, PpK, SPC, APQP, PFMEA, Kaizen, Muda,
Mura, yadda, yadda, yadda. Business leaders speak the language of ROI, NPV,
EBITDA, ROA, ROS, etc. While both groups have the best interests of the
organization at heart, they are divided by the way they speak, the business
languages that they use and the methodologies that they employ. If they want to
be taken seriously by business leaders, I believe quality professionals must start
speaking the language of business and argue in terms of the most important issue
at every company: Money.
The easiest way to do this is to translate the language of quality into the language
of dollars and cents, and the easiest way to do that is to focus on Cost of Quality
(CoQ). Probably one of the most neglected areas of quality in the past years, CoQ
is seeing a resurgence in interest recently, and it is really the one that needs to be
focused on the most. Cost of Quality is where the rubber meets the road and it
can make or break a company. CoQ is composed of two equally important areas,
Cost of Poor Quality (CoPQ) and Cost of Good Quality (CoGQ).
The other side of the coin is the cost of good quality, which takes into account:
1. Appraisal costs - The cost for detecting a poor-quality product or a process that
is not running at optimum level. These are the cost of detection. They help to
internalize the failures, but they also help to reduce the external failures. These
costs represent daily ongoing costs to the business.
Great, you say, I understand the concept, but how do I get this across to
leadership? Well, this comes back to communication and choosing the correct
language to articulate your needs. We need the conversations to move from “I need
$X so I can improve CpK and give you six sigma performance” to “I need $X - so I
can add $XXXXX to the bottom line and increase capacity by Y%”. Now we are
speaking the language that business leaders understand. I am certain your request
will get far more attention and a higher approval rate than before.
Here are four obvious (yet hard to accomplish) steps I recommend that quality
professionals should take to begin a culture change at their organizations:
1. Swap out your terms - Stop using the term “quality.” Not literally, just use
“business” instead, especially when talking to management types. Replace “Quality
Management System” with “Business Management System.” Instead of talking
about quality standards, use business standards in its place.
2. Change how you communicate - Change the language of quality to the language of
business. Move a management review from an annual torture session for your
executives to a quarterly review of your quality financial performance.
3. Remove the silos - Become one tribe speaking the same language and pull
accounting, operations, executive leadership and quality together.
4. Use the tools - There are an almost endless number of tools in the quality
professional’s tool kit, like cloud-based ERP and EQMS solutions. Use the correct
one for the job at hand. You will be amazed at how effective your teams become.