Some organizations, particularly early stage companies, may feel they can’t afford a dedicated quality team. After all, quality is fundamentally a non-value-added function. It doesn’t contribute directly to the delivery of a product or service. However, we live in a world of variability, where every step in the delivery process can cause defects. You may be passionate about eliminating defects and saving money, but do you really know how? Quality professionals understand how to determine root cause, and they can investigate from an impartial perspective. They have expertise in sampling and statistics, and that enables them to distinguish between a one-time occurrence and a downward trend that requires focused resources.
Do you care about ISO 9001 certification? If you do, you need someone to develop and maintain a quality management system, monitor process conformance, and host the auditors. If you’re in regulated industry, you need someone to understand and communicate process and documentation requirements throughout your organization. Other responsibilities that could be assigned to the quality team include environmental, health and safety (EHS), new employee training, equipment calibration, and new supplier qualification.
All of these tasks can theoretically be handled by people in other functional groups, but you have to ask yourself whether you’re getting the results your business requires. Organizational design derives from a logical division of labor. The sales team is separate from product (or service) fulfillment so that one group can focus on the customer and another can focus on meeting customer needs. Fulfillment may require separate teams for development (design) and delivery. As the business grows, other functions are typically created to handle tasks that require specialized skills, such as accounting and human resources.
Quality is another example of a specialized function, one that can help identify and eliminate waste and other costs that reduce profit and productivity. Maybe those costs are tolerable during periods of rapid growth, but at some point your market will mature, growth will slow, and you won’t be able to afford to waste money anywhere in your value stream. That’s when you need quality professionals, and a function that can coordinate all the little quality management activities that are already underway in your organization.
Bio:
Director-level global operations manager experienced in leading hardware engineering and new product development teams, project & program management (PMP certification), quality engineering (Six Sigma Black Belt), and international manufacturing and supply chain management for consumer electronics and industrial markets.
Contact: http://timwrodgers.wix.com/timwrodgers