Oct
20
At long last Quality means business
The boys behind the ISO 9001 standard and its many derivatives have been busy under the radar. They have been making fundamental changes to its underlying requirements which present huge cost and risk saving opportunities to businesses which understand them.
Whilst early compliance was largely about codification: stating what the organisation did and how it did it; modern compliance has moved very firmly to improving the ‘how’, through a move which has transformed compliance from box-ticking bureaucracy to a valuable tool for continuous improvement.
It can be argued that ISO 9001 and its derivatives apply to any company but it is the sectors that involve highly skilled people to which they really apply: particularly the high-tech industries of mechanical, civil, electrical, electronic, chemical and biochemical engineering; pharmaceuticals, aerospace and others based on cutting edge science or technology.
The organisations in these industries are the opposite of the white collar factories: the service and entertainment organisations that rely on process automation rather than people skills to run their operations. High tech industries need standards to capture, foster and disseminate best practice, not to replace human intelligence with an automated workflow.
Codifying the ‘how’ – once a tortuous process – has been made much much easier and quicker to accomplish through the predominance of visual process mapping tools. It is difficult to know which came first but certainly as procedures have been replaced by visual representations of best practice and their publication has become digital and interactive, the focus of compliance has shifted from codification to continuous improvement.
Whilst this is positive evolution and for the best companies represents a path that they would follow anyway, it implies and requires a cultural shift which many organisations appear to have missed.
Specifically:
- it requires a focus on outputs rather than inputs;
- it necessitates the move from a 1-way street where instructions are pushed out to the workforce, to a multi-way street where every employee is interactively involved in improving the organisation;
- it requires the organisation as a whole to change and for that change to be led from the top.
These changes have the potential to transform the nature of Quality and the implications of this cultural shift are explored in depth in a new white paper which can be downloaded here The Quiet Evolution in Best Practice and its impact on Business Improvement.
At long last, though a detailed understanding and application of these changes Quality departments can now take centre stage in business improvement.
