Whether it’s referred to as Total Quality Management or a Quality Management System, knowing what your business is producing and verifying that it’s at the quality level it should be, matters enormously.
When a brand gets known for producing a quality product or delivering a service level that’s the envy of their peers and then lets their standards drop, this is the beginning of the end of their reputation. Competitors will quickly jump on the opportunity to better them and typically make a lot of not-so-subtle noise about it too. The situation leaves a business leader scratching their head about how it all went so wrong?
In this article, we look at the six reasons why quality management is important for your business and why auditing the quality management processes matters too.
1. Quality is Reflected Across Almost Every Part of the Organization
When effective standards aren’t set within each individual department, then there’s nothing practical to measure performance against. This leads to some fairly obvious problems preventing a department from performing at its best because no one knows what’s expected and at what level.
For instance, in the accounting department, the sales ledger team will be responsible for invoicing the customers or clients and then following up to chase the payment of the outstanding invoice. Targets must be set, and procedures put in place about how the company goes about requesting payments, including the delinquent invoices.
The processes should be proven as ones that work making any deviation from them questionable. In the case of receivables, a percentage of the outstanding invoices or invoiced value should be collected within a specific time. This allows the team to know what’s expected of them and have procedures to follow to achieve it.
2. Maintaining Quality Control Leads to Happier Customers
When quality control is properly established and maintained in a manufacturing setting, products are more reliably produced. For customers, they get what they’re expecting and don’t suffer faulty products or other things that they weren’t expecting.
The level of production and design quality can filter all the way down to the supplied product instructions. These are often confusingly brief and unclear for many people causing lost time and frustration when receiving a product. Just prioritizing the instructions and providing an online video to show how a product is assembled or used for the first time is going the extra mile compared to many other brands.
When product quality is maintained, it makes life better for the company across the board. Their Customer Service team is not inundated with complaints, the design team is happier because the customer satisfaction rating is high, and the brand reputation scores well too. No amount of extra money spent on advertising can achieve that.
3. Better Cost Controls and Less Money Lost to Mistakes
When mistakes happen, it almost always costs money to resolve them.
There’s a need to satisfy the customer who’s upset about the faulty product or bad service level. Time must be spent reviewing what happened to determine whether the systems were inadequate to the task or not. Also, spending time fixing issues takes staff away from other important tasks like serving customers better. Money is lost at different junctures along the way when mistakes happen due to quality declining or procedures not being followed.
To avoid these kinds of issues, it’s necessary for companies not only to have good systems and processes, but to verify both that they’re being adhered to and to confirm if they’re working as they’re intended to. Otherwise, standards will slip, or established procedures will be ignored, and no one will notice until something bad happens.
To address this problem, audit training is needed with staff who are responsible for assessing the effectiveness of the quality management across all aspects of the business operation. This isn’t an area that many people are familiar with, so sometimes staff must take a training course to learn how to audit quality management properly.
The FindCourses.com website features many useful training courses on auditing quality management both across different industries and for a single industry. You can find a curated list of the courses here: https://www.findcourses.com/search/auditing-quality-management-courses.
4. Employee Morale is Higher Too
Working for a business that keeps making crucial mistakes in their service or product offering leaves a sour taste in the mouth of employees. Staff want to feel proud of the company they work for and pleased with what they produce. Being able to say where they work and get a positive reaction from other people (instead of a negative one) adds value to their status beyond their salary and bonus package.
For employee retention and recruitment too, a company that is performing well and not letting customers down frequently will retain staff and find it easier to recruit more. When the better performance leads to faster growth and requires the Human Resources team to get more staff quickly, it helps to have enough positive word of mouth that applicants are enthusiastic about working for the company. This is vastly better than people just applying because they need a job and not caring much about whom they work for. This eventually shows itself in the lack of quality in the applicants and their on-the-job performance too.
5. Continuous Improvement to Stay Relevant
The idea of continuous improvement is anathema to many businesses that prefer to keep operating exactly the same way as before. When asking an employee why they do something a certain way, their answer from this type of business will often be: “Because that’s the way it’s always been done.”
Similarly, companies that operate by never changing or being extremely slow to change, develop a workforce that is stuck in the mud and happy to wallow in it.
Quality management doesn’t only mean maintaining the same standards which never get higher, better or more stringent. It doesn’t and shouldn’t mean stagnation. There’s a need to aim for continuous improvement across all facets of operation right down to how individual tasks are completed. This way, the business raises its standards and often does things faster and improved over times past. Also, it ensures the company can keep up with their best competitors that are already doing this.
6. Business Survivability
Business survival is not something that people like to think about, but it’s a reality that the majority of businesses don’t survive. Even if they get through the early part of the growth from startup to a mature business, then what?
The difference between companies that do well and those that struggle is often what they produce either through their products or delivered with services to customers. Both establishing and managing quality levels is a necessity for businesses to succeed in the long run. While it is true that some companies scrape along doing the minimum and making many mistakes over the years, few survive like this forever.
One good downturn in the market and their lack of effective standards for quality, processes, and responsiveness to changing market conditions and they’re usually done for. However, businesses that have their eye on the ball and maintain quality standards often have the brand reputation to retain most of their customers even in the face of a difficult trading environment.
Quality management and the auditing of it is important for companies that wish to separate themselves from the pack. A lack of either and it’s often easy to foresee what the future holds for the company and their employees.
