When International Flavors & Fragrances (IFF) set out to harmonize quality systems across continents, they expected technical challenges, such as process mapping, system configuration and data migration. What they got instead was something far more human — time zones, translations and a heavy southern accent trying to bridge three continents.
“With the heavy southern accent that I have, you can imagine that speaking globally, we run into issues,” says Waylon Ferguson, who manages quality information systems at IFF.
It’s the kind of honest admission you don’t usually hear in corporate success stories, but it captures something essential about what actually happens when companies try to standardize quality processes across borders.
IFF — the company behind flavors and fragrances in products millions of people consume daily — faces a challenge familiar to any global manufacturer: How do you create consistent quality processes when your operations span different languages, cultures, and time zones?
The Technical Plan Meets Human Reality
The plan looked straightforward on paper. Implement ETQ Reliance® as a centralized quality management platform across IFF’s nutrition and bioscience divisions. One system, standardized processes, better data visibility. Ferguson came to IFF with twenty years of quality experience from nuclear propulsion, where he’d been configuring ETQ since late 2015. He knew the technology.
ETQ solved the technical challenges. The human ones — like the late Sunday night phone calls — required a different approach.
“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten a call at eight o’clock on a Sunday night, and it’s Singapore in our case,” Ferguson explains. “It’s late here, but that’s when they’re in for their day.
The global footprint that makes harmonization necessary is the same thing that makes it complicated. Singapore’s Monday morning is someone else’s Sunday evening. Critical discussions happen when half the team is winding down their weekend.
The time zone problem is solvable with flexibility and shifting schedules. The language barriers proved more subtle.
“Translations are not always word for word,” Ferguson notes. “The way that we may speak and say something doesn’t translate the same to others.”
Technical terminology in quality management doesn’t always map cleanly across languages. What seems clear in English can become ambiguous in translation, and misunderstandings in quality processes aren’t just inconvenient. They can impact compliance and product safety.
Then there’s the medium itself.
“We all know that a phone call is better than a text, right?” Ferguson says. “Chatting within meetings is much easier than emails because something could be taken out of context.”
When you’re coordinating complex process changes across multiple sites, the richness of real-time conversation matters. Email chains become games of telephone across time zones.
For IFF, ETQ Reliance was never the issue. By consolidating multiple quality systems into one platform, it eliminated the complexity that would have made global coordination even harder.
Automated workflows and system triggers handled the administrative burden, freeing Ferguson’s team to focus on what actually mattered: getting people to work together effectively. The platform gave them something precious — time and mental space to solve the human problems instead of fighting with their technology.
Finding What Actually Works
Through trial and error — and Ferguson is frank about the errors — IFF discovered what makes global harmonization work. It requires people available across different hours, not necessarily 24/7 support, but team members who can flex their schedules.
Some people start earlier to catch the end of another region’s workday. Others lean into evening meetings to overlap with morning elsewhere.
“It’s much easier when you have people around the clock that are available,” Ferguson says. “Maybe people within your group where you can hand off.”
ETQ Reliance helps with those handoffs, maintaining continuity when the baton passes from one region to another. With a single source of trusted quality data accessible across all sites, teams don’t waste time reconciling conflicting information or chasing down which version is current. The system enforces process compliance automatically, so there are no surprises at audit time. But the QMS only works when the human coordination works first.
Sometimes the answer is admitting when something isn’t working.
“There have been times where we’ve just said, hey, we just can’t work through with this group or whatever, maybe dialect or maybe just hours,” Ferguson admits. “Sometimes it takes a failure or two before you get the right team together to get it done.”
That willingness to acknowledge failure and try a different configuration of people is itself a lesson. Global harmonization isn’t just about getting everyone on the same system — it’s about finding the right combinations of people who can actually collaborate across the barriers.
The Broader Picture
IFF’s experience reveals something important about quality harmonization that gets lost in technical discussions. The human infrastructure matters as much as the digital infrastructure. You can have the best quality management platform available, but if your teams can’t communicate effectively across borders, the system becomes a sophisticated filing cabinet rather than a catalyst for improvement.
IFF’s consolidated platform delivered the expected benefits — reduced licensing costs, faster audit preparation, streamlined workflows — but those gains only mattered because they freed up resources to focus on what truly drives quality: people working together effectively across borders.
The company is still in the middle of their journey. They’re expanding ETQ Reliance to incorporate safety alongside quality, pulling in new groups and working through the inevitable friction that comes with change. Ferguson describes it as “very quality driven at this time” with plans to broaden the scope.
For companies facing similar global quality challenges, IFF’s experience offers a different kind of roadmap, one that’s not the polished before-and-after transformation, but the messy middle where most organizations actually live.
And the practical lessons they’ve learned can help anyone else attempting to solve the same problems:
- Build flexibility into your team structure, not just your processes
- Account for the human effort required to bridge language and cultural differences
- Expect communication breakdowns and plan for how you’ll recover from them
- Be willing to reorganize teams when configurations aren’t working.
- And perhaps most importantly, be honest about the challenges rather than pretending they don’t exist
“Flexibility for sure,” Ferguson says when asked about the greatest challenge to quality harmonization.
That flexibility in their schedules, communication approaches and team composition turns out to be what makes the technical harmonization possible.
The flavors and fragrances that IFF produces are all about getting the chemistry right. Their quality harmonization journey is teaching them that getting the human chemistry right comes first.
