Integrating Quality into Business Systems for High Performance

This benchmarking report offers practices, operational methods and performance metrics from over 30 quality organizations that have successfully integrated their quality function into day-to-day business operations drastically contributing to their bottom line efficiencies.

Specifically, the report highlights the following areas of quality integration:

• Establishing Processes and Standards of Excellence for Quality Integration
• Creating a Quality Mindset and Culture
• Performance Measurement and Key Quality Metrics
• Designing Quality into New Products, Services and Processes

Industries Profiled:
Biotech; Computer Hardware; Computers; Banking; Health Care; Manufacturing; Chemical; Government; Telecommunications; Shipping; Diversified; Financial Services; Energy; Pharmaceutical; Consumer Products; Transportation; Insurance; Utilities; Retail; Internet


Companies Profiled:

Study Snapshot

Integrated Quality Systems are critical to an organization’s health and profitable growth and to ensure the value, safety, efficiency and effectiveness of its products and services. For the many companies that operate with some form of regulatory oversight the hurdles for success may seem even higher. Regulated marketplaces require organizations to comply with often rigorous, technical or bureaucratic standards.

To compete successfully in regulated industries, companies must learn to integrate their quality systems into their business operations.

Sample Key Findings

Integrated Quality Excellence is leadership-driven and frequently employs centralization of expertise and clear standards of excellence as proven deployment methods.
Quality is a key driver of efficiency, revenue, customer satisfaction and loyalty. Continuously improving quality and productivity to achieve better results is a top-level goal for every organization. But without a leadership team that is passionate about quality and productivity improvements, the quality group cannot reach its full potential.
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Process excellence models—which yield consistently high quality and business performance—employ multiple productivity techniques such as structured problem solving, process management, process ownership, process simplification, and sundry lean-sigma improvement approaches.
High-functioning quality systems invariably focus on running high-performance work processes. In short, quality products and services spring from quality processes. In this respect, various hallmarks of excellence revealed themselves during field research.
Process management and process ownership are critical factors of high performance. Important work flows—through groups and across functions—have clear process owners. These owners apply problem-solving and multiple process management techniques, such as six sigma, lean, value mapping and cycle time reduction, to continuously improve the quality, function and flow of the work process.
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Accelerate the speed of quality integration into business operations through coordinated co-location, embedding and change management.
Three recurring catalysts for quality integration are co-location, embedding and change management. These three tools or tactics provide high-octane support for integrating quality excellence directly into business operations.
Co-locating Experts Near The Work: First, companies co-locate quality experts at the plant, on the floor, on the line or right at the work cell. By placing quality-improvement experts at the point of work, front-line employees more rapidly absorb their process improvement tools and problem-solving techniques.
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High performers embrace multiple forms of problem prevention through design, simplification, error avoidance and early warnings of systemic problems.
Prevention-based management has many forms or dimensions. All are integral to highly evolved quality systems. A central goal for quality leaders is to move the organization from catching product and service defects before they reach customers to a proactive posture where the company prevents problems from occurring.
Prevention’s Many Faces: Field research demonstrates that “prevention’ has many faces. The holy grail, of course, is to prevent all quality defects. However, some high performers use early warning systems and leading indicators to identify early problems before they become large problems. Correspondingly, some have learned to identify and fix component weaknesses before they hurt the whole system’s function or performance. Again, this is a more limited—but pragmatic—form of prevention. Six Sigma design of new products focuses on creating products that are engineered to be near defect-free.
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• Creating Standards of Excellence
• Leadership: Top-Down Support Drives Effective Deployments
• Integrating Quality into Job Responsibilities

• Key Metrics and Tools
• Driving Quality Integration Through Data Management Systems
• Quality Methodologies

• Embedding Quality into the Business
• Managing Change
• Empowering Front-Line Personnel to Make Quality Decisions
• Incenting a Quality Mindset
• Communicating Quality Goals and Successes

• Designing Quality into New Products
• Planning for Quality