How quality leaders drive business continuity

Eric Stoop, CEO of EASE, explores the way in which the outbreak of Covid-19 has driven the need for quality management, as well as the need for new and unique auditing methods.

Through no fault of its own, quality management has developed a bad reputation in many organisations – treated merely as a tick box exercise that has to be completed. However, the pandemic has highlighted just how important quality is for an organisation. Quality is directly linked to business continuity, contributing to consistent processes and constant product quality, regardless of any external circumstances affecting a business.

However, Covid-19 has turned the tables in favour of quality management, as well as unique auditing methods, to help quality leaders verify process adherence amid industry change and disruption. Here’s how.

Cleaning up quality’s reputation

Most quality leaders got into the profession due to a genuine interest in helping companies make better products. Despite these good intentions, however, quality management tends to get a bad rap. They’re the sticklers for details. The enforcers of policies. The ones that are raising red flags when a plant is pushing hard to complete a big order.

Quality is often seen as something that happens in an office, concerned more with paperwork than plant floor operations. This image problem had made it very difficult for quality leaders to impact the way that many had hoped to do when they started their careers. But like it has done so many other places, the coronavirus crisis has changed the equation. Quality is an increasingly critical line of defence, helping keep businesses on a steady course as the manufacturing industry adapts to changing conditions.

Quality takes centre stage amid pandemic

Manufacturing saw some of the most significant changes in decades in 2020 due to the pandemic, with wide-ranging effects across different industries.

Automotive manufacturing plants shut down for eight weeks in the spring, followed by a restart unlike any seen before and a stronger than expected rebound. As restaurant traffic dwindled or stopped altogether in some areas, retail food sales grew 85% last year while the food industry strained under fast-growing demand. Still, other companies shifted production to critical medical supplies like ventilators and personal protective equipment (PPE).

On top of changes in demand, companies had to adjust production lines to accommodate social distancing requirements, added shifts and missing workers. Supply chain disruption has been a pervasive problem, with many organisations having to rely on different suppliers with whom they have less experience.

Businesses face the same question in all of these situations: how can we make sure quality is consistent amid such rapid change?

Process verification is the key

Given these challenges, companies need to ensure process adherence to root out defects when processes and lines are changing. Compared to product inspections, process audits are a more effective way to do this.

For example, Auto News reported an instance where Subaru recently learned the hard way what can happen when even a single operator strays from standardised processes. In this situation, an operator using an incorrect torque wrench technique ultimately required the company to recall hundreds of vehicles.

So which approach would have been more likely to catch the problem, a process audit or a product inspection? A process audit would be the only way to find this issue before manufacture.

Layered process audits drive business continuity

Layered process audits (LPAs) take process verification to a higher level. LPAs provide multiple levels of assurance for high-risk or critical-to-quality process inputs. High-risk processes are audited daily, with auditors participating at a frequency based on their job role.

In essence, you have multiple individuals doing daily checks of process inputs known to cause quality problems, for example, equipment settings or specific procedure steps. This makes it far more likely for defects to spotted before products are ever shipped to customers.

Benefits of this unique approach include:

• Leverage down the cost of quality by finding problems before they cause complaints
• Ensuring compliance with standards when there are changing setups and team members involved with a process
• Preventing quality escapes and audit findings that threaten the business reputation
• Reducing rework that accounts for the essential operating capacity

While many LPA programs are administered using pen and paper, digital audit software is the key to unlocking the value of LPAs. Digital platforms manage scheduling and administration details so quality leaders can focus on analysing audit findings and following up on problems.

READ MORE:

• Biometric authentication: the good, the bad and the ugly
• You’ve had a breach – how do you successfully roll out an emergency patch?
• How to successfully reopen your office in a post-Covid-19 world
• Common migration pitfalls and how to avoid them

Ultimately, quality professionals have always known that the work they do is essential to business continuity. Today’s industry challenges, however, are making that truth more visible, providing quality leaders with the opportunity to make an impact as they have never done before.

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