Voice of Business – Quality management

All about quality management

Want to know everything about quality management? You are in the right place. Here you will find everything about what quality management means and how you can measure and improve it.

• What is quality management?
• External and internal quality
• Quality management trends and developments
• Quality management as part of Experience Management
• How to improve quality?
• What is a quality system?
• How can quality management software help?
• Indispensable features in quality management

What is quality management?

Quality management is about safeguarding and improving the quality of a product, production process, service or organization and affects all organizational units that contribute to the final result. The quality of (parts of) products, services and processes is mapped through internal and external audits.

Internal audits are periodic checks, initiated by the organization itself and performed by auditors employed by the organization. External audits are performed on behalf of external certification bodies. An example is the well-known ISO certification.

External and internal quality

External quality

The external quality is determined by the customer. Because customers have different expectations, external quality is subjective. Managing customer expectations and brand experience is becoming increasingly important in quality management.

Internal quality

Internal quality concerns all steps that add value to the end result, but are invisible to the customer. It can be expressed as the ratio between the actual number of errors made and the identified probability of errors.

Quality management trends and developments

Quality management is becoming increasingly important and complex. Striking trends and developments are:

• quality management is becoming more important and complex
• customers are becoming more demanding
• data collection is more advanced

Automatically collect and analyze data

The world of quality management is becoming increasingly important and complex. Many organizations try to keep up with this manually. If you want to keep a grip on quality, it is better to automate the collection and analysis of data.

Customer-oriented approach is essential

Today’s customers are demanding, knowledgeable and know what they want. Regardless of the product or service, everything has to be right. Delivery, service, accessibility… If organizations cannot deliver in accordance with customer demand, customers will happily go to the competitor. Experiences and opinions are disseminated via social media. Negative unfortunately even sooner than positive. A customer-centric approach is essential to resist these threats and turn them into opportunities.

Predict what customers want

A current trend is to make customer satisfaction predictions based on previously collected data. A year or two ago it was still special if you could contact a company’s customer service via social media or chat. Today this is standard. In fact, if you don’t get an answer within an hour, customers will get impatient. With predictive knowledge, store owners already know what customers want the moment they walk in. Purely based on previous experiences!

Quality management as part of Experience Management

What is Experience Management?

With Experience Management you listen with equal attention to what customers (Voice of Customer), employees (Voice of Employee) and company results (Voice of Business) are saying. In recent years, customer feedback has received a lot of attention. But with that alone, your perspective is too limited. Listening to employees also provides a lot of valuable information. The same goes for business results. Because what are all those satisfied customers and happy employees worth if you don’t achieve the desired result at the bottom?

Three pillars within quality management

The sport is to structurally include all sub-areas in your quality management system. Experience Management is a relatively young discipline, a combination of business administration, organizational studies, change management, psychology and marketing. By combining the results of customers (Voice of Customer), employees (VOE) and the organization (VOB), you create insight into the whole and make the right considerations for the entire organization.

How to improve quality?

Two golden rules apply to successfully improving quality management:

1. The entire organization is needed
2. Adjustment is a continuous process

All organizational layers on board

Implementing improvements haphazardly does not have the desired effect. Make your quality management successful by involving all organizational layers. Only then can you realize improvements on three levels: strategic, tactical and operational.

Managing quality is a continuous process

It is crucial to set up the right quality measurements in all three areas (customer, employee and business). Then tackle the problem areas – together with the rest of the organization – and thus structurally improve the performance of the company. In this way you continuously contribute to satisfied customers, loyal employees and a healthy company. Within the integrated Experience Management approach, this looks like this:

From mandatory measurements to actual improvement

Suppose you start by performing a quality measurement (MEASUREMENT) because you as an organization are obliged to do so. For example because of quality standards such as ISO, NEN, HKZ and AQAP. When you automate the measurement, you can ANALYZE the results better. By disseminating the results within the organization, you involve others (ACTIVATE) in the intended change. In this way you go from a mandatory measurement to the joint realization of improvements (MOTIVATING) that have a positive effect on the quality of the organization as a whole!

Good basis for further development

If a step is missing or not implemented at a sufficient level, opportunities to improve or motivate employees are missed. When everything is in order, and the entire organization is aligned and actively participating, the foundation is laid to exceed customer expectations and grow the organization.

What is a quality system?

Quality management requires a quality system. Because if you want to focus on quality, you will have to map out all associated processes. A quality system is a system for directing and controlling an organization with regard to quality.

Quality management software can help to steer and control quality in the right direction. By automating and digitizing all your questionnaires, forms and checklists in one place, you have plenty of time to focus on improving quality!

How can quality management software help?

Organizations often find it difficult to translate an overload of quality measurements into improvements. How do you involve the entire organization in measuring and improving quality? How exactly do you set up your quality system as a continuous process? Think carefully about what you want to measure and how and when you can do it best. Continuously collecting data with checklists and audits is the basis of any quality management system. But often this is still done manually, on paper or in Excel.

Get rid of those paper forms

With the digitization of your forms and checklists, the continuous collection of data suddenly becomes very easy. This saves you time that you can spend on what really matters: implementing measurement-based improvements and really managing quality. Software helps you to continuously collect relevant data with which you gain insight into points for improvement that lead to the right adjustments to improve quality.

Indispensable features in quality management

• Quality management app
  Make giving feedback or filling out forms as easy as possible for users or respondents through a multi-channel approach with multiple devices (iOS, Android mobile app, tablet, smartphone and desktop).
• Video, audio and photo support
  By offering the auditor the option to add videos, audio or photos to the findings, it becomes clear at a glance what areas for improvement are. Photos or videos say more than 1,000 words and with that you also reduce the chance of discussions afterwards.
• Conditions and margins
  Is a result right or wrong and why? Determine in advance the margins within which an assessment is right or wrong, so that there is no ambiguity afterwards.
• Integrated scoring
  By adding scores (percentage or 10-point scale) you give the most important parts of your checklist more weight than other, less important parts.
• Triggers & Alerts
  With triggers and alerts you can automatically share insights with the right people in the organization, so that points for improvement can be followed up immediately.
• Real-time reports
  In the fast-paced world we live in, you can no longer get away with outdated data. Make sure your reports are always up to date with the latest data and based on the most recent version of standards and regulations and legislation.
• Visually appealing reports
  Avoid boring tables and graphs. Activate quality awareness with visually appealing reports and infographics, so that it becomes manageable and comes to life in the organization.