The fourth phase of the Quality Journey is Transform. While you are reaching the full potential of how Quality can transform an organization, driving a culture of quality to all corners, now is not the time to let up. Quality becomes more strategic, and you go from being a cost center to being a profit center. With continued success comes more opportunities to expand. 

When you reach the Transform phase, you have even greater opportunities for Quality to make a difference within the organization. Your team, your leadership, and your partners all understand the value quality brings to existing processes and to the organization. There are key areas where you can focus for the future: 

It’s time to harmonize your quality systems across all your locations. There are many benefits from not just aligning your quality systems but consolidating them as well.  

• You and your IT team will have fewer systems to manage. There is a cost savings with fewer environments, fewer applications. The savings from hardware and maintenance alone can be significant. 

You can find additional value by not just expanding and harmonizing your quality processes across all locations by reaching beyond quality into harmonized safety, risk management and industrial transformation initiatives. If you haven’t already, you should be integrating advanced quality analytics into all your quality and safety programs. 

Predictive analytics will allow you to proactively identify, prioritize, and investigate potential product quality and safety issues and reduce manual effort by identifying and investigating problems in a more automated and targeted way.

Once you have your core quality system in place, look for expansion opportunities beyond your core product design, manufacturing, and supplier quality processes. Your entire product lifecycle has an impact on your cost of quality and the perception of your goods and services. For example, consider the quality implications of your distribution and service network. The core tenants of quality management and continuous improvement should be applied to every phase of the product lifecycle.

As you expand, a key area to keep front and center is risk management. Make sure you have assigned risks across processes and track these risks worldwide. This will actually help you be more adaptable when conditions change, as you will understand the risks associated with different approaches and actions.

You’ve been able to bring your suppliers into your QMS to be part of the workflow when you need to address corrective actions. Your suppliers really are your partners. The more your suppliers are in alignment with your processes, the more effective and productive you will be in day to day operations and with audits. At this point, you may have an opportunity to ask suppliers to use your quality management system or have a higher level of integration with the QMS they are using. 

A key initiative will be to provide supplier performance data to suppliers and to your procurement team so they can hold suppliers accountable if there are issues. Supplier quality should be the responsibility of everyone who deals with suppliers. With a comprehensive QMS, your quality practices can transform your supplier practices. An agile system ensures you can adapt to outside market forces while also maintaining local policies.

At the end of the day, having a fully integrated system where you can access data as needed will help drive quality throughout the organization. This data comes from your quality operations as well as other parts of the organization. You want to be able to push a button if a question comes up from management, an audit or a supplier, and easily have the answer at your fingertips.

Your QMS should be able to provide ongoing, real-time stats on how you are progressing with quality. Advanced quality analytics will help you monitor training and identify areas for further improvement. You can track findings across locations to take advantage of key local learnings. With the right data, you can address log-standing issues and focus on advancing the state of quality in your organization. For example, tagging your corrective actions allows you to see trends and identify systemic issues. 

Organizations that reach the Transform phase usually understand the value that their quality processes drive. Rather than just thinking about CAPAs, nonconformances and the like, you need to think in business terms. It’s time to quantify the impact quality is having on your organization.

When you reach this goal, you will find that:

• 1) it will be easier to get quality projects approved, and
• 2) management may start asking you what else you can do before you ask to do it. Quality won’t be thought of as some extra function, but it will be part of how everyone operates.