Developing Partnerships for Quality

Developing Partnerships for Quality culture

Introduction

Quality is now the major differentiator in today's increasingly competitive business environment. In the event of increasing global competition, the continuous increase in customer expectations and customers' demands, as the quality of services and products improve, those companies that become unable to cater for the needs and wants of customers risk losing them to competitors. Ultimately they risk erosion of profits and thus failure. Companies are being forced to think up strategies that will assist them in building and maintaining a competitive edge. One such strategy has been the development of quality and quality management within the organisation. The article describes how to build a Quality culture in the organisation. Building a quality culture is not an easy task. Developing a focus on quality seems very easy but it really is not a straightforward thing to achieve. Organisations spend years of efforts and budget to achieve the goal. What is needed is to focus attention on various aspects as described below.

Initiate Quality

There has to be some beginning. As usual with any improvements, it starts with gap analysis.

Where is the organisation now?

What does it wants to achieve?

Find out the gap

Though the organisation may be very small, there will be some good points, which should be kept as-is or enhanced further. After finding the gaps, lay down a plan to conquer the gaps. You will need to develop organisation wide quality standards. To do this it will be required to study what suits the organisation and then apply the right balance. The model you select should match the company's vision and corporate policy. There are many international models available e.g. ISO, CMM, CMMI, Six Sigma etc.

Quality Commitment

Commitment from Senior Management is a “MUST”. In fact, it is the driving force. Many a time it is observed that, either the senior management allocates the budget for such activities and forget about it or the senior management behaves in an autocratic way.

Neither results in successful implementation of Quality processes. Procedures, tools, and database are all useless if the senior management do not want to see a Quality culture in the organisation. It is going to fail if management only wants to run behind getting certified to so and so quality standard. Even if the certification is achieved, there is no guarantee that, it will be practiced. The employees of the organisation will not care, if the senior ...