The Rest of the Story: How to Make Quality a Top Priority
Previously we challenged you to “Decide if your company really wants to improve quality!” (See part 1 of this topic in the September 17, 2022 blog). This week we’ll reveal how a company can de-emphasize quality without even realizing, and what to do about it.
After 14 years managing corporate quality, I moved to a role with P&L responsibility and realized that quality is viewed very differently from “the business side”. Before, I was dedicated to making quality improvements and achieving 100% customer satisfaction, an uphill battle of incremental improvements requiring constant pushing & aligning of functional teams. Suddenly, running a multi-million dollar business unit, the priorities were revenue growth & profit margin. Quality was rarely a topic of management meetings and metrics lacked quality improvement goals. It was as if leadership was saying “Quality’s not that important”.
Upper management talked about quality not as a growth enabler or savings opportunity but as an area to quietly manage. To them, quality was about maintaining & reacting, not driving improvement. Discussions were about inspection costs, customer pain, slow root cause investigations, and irritating documentation – always negative aspects. “Don’t distract engineering - go handle it” was the unspoken (and at times spoken) sentiment for the Quality team. Peers in other groups didn’t want to work on quality issues, and who could blame them? - painful interactions with angry customers, torturous audits, and action items outside your expertise. Quality was viewed as a drain of time, energy, & money. Leaders without quality background were even more likely to diminish its importance. We had to make an extraordinary effort to regain our quality focus, driving several strategic and tactical changes to turn things around:
- Holding an off-site leadership meeting to review quality performance and set short- and long-term goals
- Aligning with upper management to own quality performance metrics
- Implementing corporate-level quality KPIs & setting quality KPIs for all functional groups
- Assigning each top-level functional manager to own a key customer’s experience and scorecard
- Training engineering to understand the impact of design choices
- Adding quality resources for each product life cycle phase (not just to create documentation and clean up emergencies)
- Cross-pollinating engineers into quality roles – a great way to generate ownership of quality and develop fresh ideas
- Proactive, planned, annual customer visits
- Tracking COPQ (cost of poor quality), COPE (cost of poor engineering), COPPM (cost of poor project management) & making those impacts visible
These are just a few of the steps needed to make strides in quality performance. CAEDENCE can help you develop your plan to shift from de-emphasizing quality to putting it in its rightful place as a pillar of a successful business, on equal footing with other top business priorities.
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