Reconciling internal quality standards with market expectations is an increasing challenge. But achieving this balance is decisive for your business success. As a manager, you should therefore mobilize all your process potentials in product creation to achieve this goal.
What can help you in this situation? Digital evolution, particularly regarding end-to-end management of quality data to keep your business in equilibrium with market demand. In addition, you gain valuable information on your quality costs.
In embarking on this transition, it is important that you view quality assurance as an end-to-end process, because decisive steps – e.g. definition of quality standards – have to be taken right at the outset.
Business potentials of quality assurance
Achieving high customer satisfaction is one of your most important business goals. You meet your sales targets, increase your market share and boost your business success.
A good business and brand reputation also lets you establish profitable contacts within your value-adding network and gain a prominent position in the industrial ecosystem.
Additionally, assuring high output quality protects you against risks. For suppliers in regulated industries, it may in fact be a mandatory requirement for obtaining marketing access in the first place. Automotive suppliers, for instance, must earn certification under IATF 16949, the norm that covers the entire value chain of automotive production. The Automotive Spice standard is a further mandatory rulebook for quality assurance.
It’s obvious: A systematic quality assurance scheme boosts efficiency and regulates your product creation costs, making your business more cost-effective and successful.
Total Cost of Quality: Data from Our Successful Customer Projects
What makes quality assurance so important?
The quality assurance process ensures that your products and services meet the quality standards you have defined and are subject to continual improvement.
Your management sets the course by making quality an essential part of your overall business strategy and integrating it with an overarching quality management system.
The process must find solutions for any market development that may impact your quality proposition:
- High expectations and low price tolerance – You should be able to fulfill complex or even contradictory customer requirements without resorting to price increases.
- Dynamic markets and technologies – Rapid introduction of products and processes represent a challenge for quality assurance and pose additional risks.
- Complex supply chains – Raw materials and precursor products are sourced from a wide variety of industries and locations – this construct must be resistant to disruptions and polycrises.
- Connected economy and society – Mistakes can snowball and even go viral – that’s why you need to prevent them wherever you can, and limit and rapidly resolve them wherever you can’t.
Benefits of effective quality processes
- Higher productivity yet lower total cost of quality
- Secure competitive edge
What the quality assurance process offers you
How the quality assurance process adds value
Value addition benefits from a product creation scheme that reliably meets the defined standards and follows the principle of continual improvement. The quality assurance process is aimed at achieving just that.
Quality assurance contributes to value creation e.g. by ensuring
- continual improvement, laying the foundation for innovation and greater added value.
- lower error rates and thereby lower resource consumption. Shortcomings can be identified at an earlier stage and resolved more quickly, saving the costs that would be incurred by late-stage corrections or even recalls. This reduces production costs and lowers your go-live risks.
- early recognition of potential problem sources and rapid countermeasures. This increases process stability and reliability while minimizing the cost risks of quality deficits.
- Additionally, quality management systems like ISO 9001 or the automotive standard IATF 16949 encourage clear structures and continual process monitoring. This makes workflows more efficient and effective, which again adds value.
The process steps of quality assurance
The elements of quality assurance follow the principle of “plan, do, check, act”: Quality planning and implementation are thus followed by quality control and quality management. At the very beginning, you must define your specific business goals of quality management.
Quality assurance and requirements management are close, interactive neighbors: Quality planning translates the criteria defined by requirements management into specific targets and activities that ensure the requisite product quality. Via the continual improvement process, the results produced by quality assurance then loop back to requirements management, because the analysis of quality data and deviations permits adjustment and optimization of requirements.
Therefore, when a product is introduced or modified, the individual steps and tasks of quality assurance are as follows:
Discover the Blueprint for a Digital Quality Process
Transformation tasks for the quality assurance process
Many businesses only talk about quality when the lack of it causes tangible problems. High reject and reworking rates, rising production costs, customer complaints and recalls or costly legal action cause major negative impacts on business and force management to act.
Finding the cause of the latest problem is paramount, but it should also lead to the question of whether the status quo of quality management and assurance still corresponds to the business goals – or whether the business is wasting opportunities for getting better.
This status check must include a review of the existing quality targets, quality strategy and quality processes: Are they indeed mutually coherent? Do they still match the business strategy and current market requirements?
These questions are so important because a successful quality assurance scheme can only be built on a systematic quality strategy that is observed throughout the enterprise: with clearly defined quality goals, an effective quality management structure and continual improvement of quality processes.
The next step involves an assessment of whether all employees have understood and internalized the company’s quality proposition. They must not regard quality management as the remit of an individual unit but rather as an obligation on everyone.
If such a status check should identify a need for transformation regarding resources and knowhow, small and medium businesses often find themselves at a loss. In such a situation, they would be well advised to seek external consulting on a digital end-to-quality process and the introduction or upgrading of quality management software.
Quality Data Management
An end-to-end data flow enables consistent implementation of a systematic quality approach along your entire value chain.
Transforming quality assurance: What role does digitalization play?
Businesses rarely give much priority to status-checking their quality assurance processes. One reason for this may well be that many businesses find it difficult to express the benefits of quality management in numerical, calculable terms.
This changes fundamentally once the company has established a sustainable digital system for handling quality data – true quality data management.
Such a tool is an ideal way to measure and document the costs and benefits of quality management. It makes it easier to advocate for change – top-down, but also bottom-up, because the business units now have access to data that can convince management to undertake investments. Conversely, management can intervene when the data show that the status quo no longer matches the business strategy.
Quality data management offers digital, software-supported quality planning, control and management. All participating segments of your value chain can be connected to it.
Precise, reliable measurement data from production and quality control are available automatically and in digital form for storage, analysis and management. They offer insights for use in decision-making, process optimization and regular quality control.
Detailed and dependable quality data make quality data management a decisive factor for efficiency and quality. This offers manufacturing businesses a wide range of benefits:
- Reliable quality control and better understanding of how quality management promotes business success
- Greater effectiveness in the achievement of quality targets
- Early identification of errors, ensuring lower reject rates and higher product quality
- Digital management of quality data for data integrity and traceability
- Document management offers benefits during audits
Digital solutions make quality management and quality assurance more efficient and effective, and they reduce costs. They also make quality processes more transparent and simplify collaboration – for many businesses, plenty of reasons for fully digitalizing their quality management schemes.
Such a structure also serves as a basis for planning the next milestones in the digital quality ecosystem:
- Leveraging a digital quality twin to find answers to almost all quality dimensions of product creation
- Relying on big data and analytics to exploit large data volumes for the benefit of your strategic goals, from systematic searches for error sources to process optimization to higher product quality
- Profiting from artificial intelligence – in automatic error identification, risk profiling and projections regarding quality problems
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Transformation: The path to agile quality assurance
Market expectations are volatile – many different factors impact processes in product creation, threaten the quality of products and services, and cause financial loss. Secure your value creation scheme by integrating a quality-oriented approach into all value-adding processes of your product development cycle, right from the outset. Exploit the potentials of digitalization to consistently implement this end-to-end approach: A digital quality data management system gives your businesses data-based insights that let you improve your processes, identify and resolve errors early and obtain forecasts on potential risks.
In this way, you ensure that the quality of your output is consistently congruent with your individual business objectives, legal requirements and market demand. Your validation and audit processes run more smoothly, and your internal and external collaboration benefits from greater transparency. By transforming your quality management system, you ensure that your business quality strategy stays in synch with market requirements at all times. An optimal quality strategy and the right choice of technology will significantly reduce your total cost of quality - McKinsey cites achievable values of up to 50 percent.
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