Caveat:  this article is not a step – by – step guideline for establishing a Quality Management System (QMS).  It’s rather a warning to think about before bringing Quality into a company.

Nowadays, there are almost a million enterprises worldwide having certified their Quality Management System (QMS).  But how many have their systems certified only because a client said so?

There are many companies where Top Management marginalized Quality to simply a  “Function.”  At the same time, they expect Quality to make clients happy and eventually bring the company to be a top competitor of the market segment.

Such companies are likely to employ a Quality Manager as a requirement to a turn-key contract  or a ISO 9000 requirement. This is where their efforts end and problems start.

Let’s face it, common quality managerial practice too often is limited to window dressing, ISO contractual requirement, organizing a meeting addressed to quality problems, being the ‘management representative’ for quality auditors and that’s it.

What we really need is constant, daily efforts by management to evangelize and reinforce quality as part of the organization’s culture.

Eventually, it’s not surprising to see Top Management disappointed having literary zero results after “thorough” quality efforts have been employed.  And what we see one floor below is: quality “professionals” are justifying their existence by creating another procedure, another policy, another form, and so on.  All to fill their paid working hours and to prove the company needs them to manage quality and ISO operations.

What risks occur? The Company spends tons of moneyfor “Quality” yet it doesn’t add any value to process performance or product compliance. Subsequently the company becomes awkward, inefficient, “acid” attitude to quality folks and whatever they are doing inside the company is growing so even if the world’s top quality guy will come working there, his efforts will be thrown in to the bin as they appear. Finally the company ends up with its product/service – more expensive and time consuming than competitor’s one. And so the company goes out of the market.

Worth to note that today’s risks associated with positioning Quality as function that works by itself and brings miracles are very kin to companies based at “Informational Era” business where young, ambitious, flexible and lean startups rushing to IT market, deploying their profit pathways competing with their elder generation rivals with “Quality Function”. The last ones lose their market place.

Resuming the above we can say that when things come to Quality, company management shall start their way to client and market appeal not with Certified Quality Management System, but with understanding that Quality will only be at any use when it’s developed to pursue company’s values. And in that connection on the first place the company must clearly understand its core values. Secondly the company shall ensure these values are well understood by each single individual inside the company. Thirdly the company wants to ensure that each single step it makes brings the company closer to its values.

Unless the company will not understand these three elementary truths, it will keep on dumping their resources, encountering disappointment, loosing market and there is no quality standard and no quality manager that will help them.

AUTHOR:
Gurbanov Roman
Founder, QHSE Focus Magazine.
www.qhsefocus.com