A QMS Resource for Quality Champions: news, perspective and commentary on hot issues in quality and quality management.
Quality professionals know the value of automation. Minimizing errors that lead to defects, freeing up internal resources and optimizing collaboration can all have a significant impact on your bottom line and brand reputation. These are all key benefits of automated quality management software.
The holiday season is fast approaching but the ETQ team is looking past the annual festival of over-indulgence and digging out our Panama hats and patterned shirts. And while vice is the last thing on our mind, the opportunity to inspire quality excellence in sunny Miami is already firmly inked into our calendars.
Most companies are well acquainted with the “visible” costs of poor quality. But these are just the tip of the iceberg compared to the deeper and more intractable “invisible” costs lurking below the waterline. It behooves companies that value quality leadership to fully understand and account for these hidden costs or risk losing consumer trust, brand reputation and, ultimately, business value.
Over the last decade, there has been a concerted effort by the quality community to raise awareness of the role that quality plays in both business optimization strategies and organizational growth. Quality is an ever-present part of life, and while the average person might not understand the impact that it has on their daily routine, the simple truth is that quality is often considered to be not only a benchmark for success but also a barometer for brand reputation and consumer trust.
Product recalls may be the least welcome part of the quality landscape, but companies that don’t put the right strategies in place to prevent these events happening are likely to keep repeating the same compliance and poor quality mistakes.
Companies that don’t factor in the need for a top-down culture of quality are likely to miss out on numerous opportunities for continuous improvement. Here at the ETQ Blog, the knowledge that quality matters is often our North Star. In fact, ETQ’s chief marketing officer Nina McIntyre was recently featured in Inc. magazine discussing how quality defines a brand, highlighting the vital importance of investing in the consumer experience.
Companies that don’t factor in the need for a top-down culture of quality are likely to miss out on numerous opportunities for continuous improvement. Here at the ETQ Blog, the knowledge that quality matters is often our North Star. In fact, ETQ’s chief marketing officer Nina McIntyre was recently featured in Inc. magazine discussing how quality defines a brand, highlighting the vital importance of investing in the consumer experience.
One of the defining elements of modern society is that consumers have more options when choosing what products they want to buy. On a basic level, freedom of choice is something that we all want, but when it comes to food safety, people are often at the mercy of a brand’s working and quality processes.
Investigative journalism conducted by CNBC has shone a light on a plethora of food product quality problems that include but are not limited to expired foods and beverages, mislabeling, counterfeit items and a host of unresolved customer complaints. Many of these identified quality pain points are related to third-party sellers as opposed to the producing brand itself, but there is a consensus that the ecommerce behemoth's apparent failure to clamp down on the number of poor quality consumable products being sold through its marketplace is impacting both consumer trust and the brand reputation of the manufacturer.
Customer expectations of product quality have evolved and grown in recent years. As a result, there is increased pressure on companies to understand both the nuances of quality itself and why quality matters. In fact, tapping into – and by association, improving - customer experience has become a holy grail for brands, many of whom have seen the benefits that come from both predicting the needs of the customer and personalizing the experience itself. On the flip side, the feedback that companies get from customer experience doesn’t give the full picture, is naturally subjective, and may not provide actionable insights into actual quality pain points.
On October 1, 2019, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a Safety Communication that was a thinly veiled wake-up call to patients, doctors and manufacturers about potential cybersecurity vulnerabilities in software used in a wide range of connected medical devices.
Whisper it quietly, but the future of quality is not just here but also making its presence felt. And thanks to a combination of the connected society, evolving customer expectations and the elevation of a digital mindset as a business optimization tool, companies are waking up to the fact that they need to adapt their working practices and quality management to fit the technology requirements of Industry 4.0.
