Implementing a quality management program across an organisation has been proven to give rise to wide ranging business benefits that can include significant cost savings in operational efficiency gains, revenue increases from improved customer satisfaction rates, and access to export markets.  Effective quality management can also improve the speed (and cost) of how we react to the ever changing business environment we operate in.

So why do many organisations feel that they have failed to realise these benefits?

One reason is an emphasis on certification. ISO is a program that shifts an organisation to a quality management approach – just getting certification to an ISO standard does not necessarily mean this has been achieved.  Certification in itself means that your quality systems have passed certain requirements and have been deemed to be operating effectively. Does it prove that there is a genuine desire to improve quality? Again, not necessarily. Organisations can fall into the trap of documenting policies and procedures in order to achieve certification requirements – rather than using them to drive quality improvements.

Indicators that your organisation may have a certification focus

Do any of these situations sound familiar?

• Process documentation is not actually used by the business
• Even if it were used, process information is out of date
• A major process review is needed ahead of each ISO certification audit
• One person or team of people are responsible for managing all process documentation

All or some of these factors indicate that an organisation is not extracting the full benefits from their quality programs – rather there is a reliance on the implicit knowledge from a few key staff members.  If this is the case, then the benefits due from quality management efforts are left to chance. Since each incremental process change is not formally captured, improvements may or may not be sustained over time, depending on the collective memory of teams.

Your organisation may be forgetting its own quality lessons

• Sales are down because competitors product upgrades were released to market before yours
• Poor installation processes have given rise to record customer complaints
• The release of your new product was delayed two months until billing processes were sorted out

Without a structured approach that ensures process improvements are consolidated into processes, it may be the case that the same mistakes are being made again and again, and investigated again and again.  This is one of the reasons that an unstructured quality management program can actually consume far more business resource in the long term than a controlled one. 

How can you ensure the benefits from your certification/management system efforts are realised?

Managing core processes need not be complex or time consuming. Capturing changes in a central, structured process repository need only take minutes. It’s the innovations and problem resolutions your staff already perform that should be taking the bulk of time.

1) BASELINE: Actively manage processes as they change

Critical to unlocking the benefits of your quality management program is ensuring your process are known, recorded, and managed as part of ongoing change management. This process knowledge must be readily accessible and in a format that is useable for teams. Page after page of procedure detail or confusing process maps is not usable. 
When faced with a quality issue, it is essential all participants start with a common understanding of the current process.

Benefits:

• Reduces delay or confusion in forming our understanding of the underlying process. 
• Reduces bad decision-making caused by misunderstandings or faulty process assumptions
• Allows quicker assessment of the cause of the failure – deciding whether it was a process breakdown (quality issue) or the process was not applied correctly (training issue)
• All stakeholders share the same understanding, so they can actually contribute effectively
• Minimises the recovery period following staff departures. These can be costly weeks / months if processes need to be rediscovered

2) INNOVATE: Simple process understanding reveals improvement opportunities

Process knowledge captured in a usable way makes it easier for teams to identify process improvements. The exercise of getting teams to form a common understanding of a process can also make inefficiencies more obvious... as well as potential solutions.

Benefits:

• Companies like FedEx and Toyota prove what effective quality management can do. They use this to retain their competitive advantage, keeping their existing customers happy, and winning new customers through innovation and reputation
• The Japanese ‘Kaizen’ philosophy reinforces this message – even small incremental innovation over time can add up to significant savings to an organisation

3) DEPLOY:  Ensure improvements are successfully deployed into day to day operations

It is one thing to design a process improvement – it is entirely another to deploy this into the reality of operations. Exactly which tools are you arming your teams with to ensure new processes deploy successfully? How do we design and capture the minor adjustments needed once the process has gone live? Or do we just hope it’s perfect on day one?
Organisations that rely on the implicit staff knowledge approach suffer in this phase.  Reliance on assumptions from poor baseline process knowledge can result in new solutions or systems implementations failing to deliver their anticipated benefits. In most cases it is the implementation project that takes the responsibility for failure – in reality this is one of the most obvious costs of poor process knowledge.

• Make it easy for teams to absorb new processes into their day to day roles – make changed processes simple and clear to understand. Quality management is dependent on their ability to understand and apply new processes effectively.
• A structured approach to quality improvements allows organisations to ‘learn’ over time. Your knowledge on what works and what doesn’t is recorded  -  innovation becomes a case of trying new things that might work, rather than a cycle of battling process problems
• Measure and communicate results – success must be measured, and encourages further innovation

Benefits:

• With accurate baseline process knowledge, change decisions are based on more accurate information and there is a greater likelihood that changes are successfully absorbed into operations
• Accurate process information means that there can be less dependence on external consultants for change projects, we don’t need someone to help us understand what our own processes are
• Teams can work together on ensuring changes across an end to end perspective work for the organisation, because they have visibility of each other’s processes

4) SUSTAIN CHANGE: Process Owners must take responsibility for their own processes

Process knowledge captured in a traditional format is just not good enough to sustain process changes and ensure that benefits are realised. Page after page of procedures or confusing, detailed process maps just turn people away from processes. This type of information is simply not relevant for day to day operations. The full cost of designing and deploying the processes has been borne, but the benefits are left to chance, in many cases, not extracted at all.
Processes may improve in the short term, but without providing processes in a way that they can be simply understood and absorbed into day to day operations, changes will not be locked in.   Staff will revert to old ways of working and fall back into old behaviours.  People will perform processes in their own way and sometimes they’ll get it right, sometimes they won’t. 
Process owners must accept responsibility for managing their own processes, ensuring that improvements are formally incorporated into them.  If they cannot change their own processes, including simple updates, they are not true process owners, and will avoid responsibility for repeated process breakdowns.
To ensure the benefits from process improvements are maintained in the long term:

• Ensure processes are available from one central place
• Ensure processes are clear - useable and understandable
• Communicate changes to staff - promote the central process knowledge base by making it the place staff need to go to for change notifications and training materials
• Give teams a means of response, a feedback mechanism to ensure their ideas shape processes in future
• Ensure that each process has a named owner, and that is can be easily updated by that person.

Benefits:

• Savings from efficiency improvements are sustainable, 6 months, a year, 2 years after implementation
• Small incremental improvements can accumulate over time
• Benefits from process improvements do not disappear over time