How to start a Quality Revolution.
Welcome to a new chapter of the helmig advisory “Close The Gap” blog posts, where we will discuss delighting customers by selling better products and services.
Now wait: You hear a statement like that, and it's like a dull thud in the back of your skull: Another article about innovation, production, or sales - boredom opens up like a chasm before you. What if we told you that the foundation of ‘excellence’ is built on, well, you guessed it, quality? And what if we warned you that the emotional experience your customers have with your products and services is what nightmares are made of? But don't look away. Lean in. Embrace it, and let quality be your guiding light…This is probably how Stephen King would write about quality…but while he is right…, let’s tone it down a bit with a slightly crude expression from one of my former colleagues:
"Quality is like having an ice cream on a summer’s day: you must lick it constantly. Otherwise, you have a mess on your hands".
Quality, most people assume, is a given. But is it? Do not most of us ‘have a mess on our hands’ by shaking the hands of companies that do not deal with their ice cream as they should?
Do you still remember the feeling when you bought a product at home that was DOA or broken shortly after use? Or the last time you ordered something, and it did not arrive in time? How about being charged wrongly, or the return policy was confusing? These instances are examples of poor quality and negatively impact the customer experience.
Quality is everything that impacts the customer experience, positive or negative. From the product or service itself, the packaging (still remember when you had the first mobile phone packaging open up and it felt…good?), to the experience of dealing with your service centre and sales employees or searching or buying on your webpage. Not being lousy is not good enough! You want to be excellent! Excellence keeps customers returning to you, increasing your customer base by word of mouth, not just short-lived, expensive ad campaigns.
Quality and excellence should be in everything you are about. Take websites: Most corporate websites are terrible when helping or listening to customers. They are great for getting the message out from internal departments like marketing, sales, sustainability, legal, and finance to publish what they believe is essential or, in the case of finance & legal - required, but how about receiving input from or helping your customers? And good luck finding stuff you want to buy, get repaired, or a price on - unless the site is called Amazon.com.
The same applies to service centres: No one that I know would put “excellence” and “service centres” in the same sentence unless the words are linked to words like “no” and “miserable” or “Kafka-esk”.
And, since we’re on it: While most products function much better since ISO9001 was adopted 30 (!) years ago by everyone and their grandmother, we still struggle when it comes to the integration of IOT (= software engineering) into the world of mechanical (engineering).
Just think about the Apps for your heating system, car, entertainment system, and house - are they - excellent? Even if you forget the integration piece: how about just the Apps of your insurance, bank, university, local grocer, or hairdresser? You can argue about the need for some of them to have an App at all, but if they have a “product” called App, should it not be - excellent?
More studies that we can read in any reasonable amount of time have been conducted on the fact that quality (excellence) is the largest detractor to growth and profitability. It is more than price or the time your sales employees spend on the road seeing your potential customers. It is the quality of the product or service and all surrounding elements.
The voice of the customer must be adhered to across service centres, sales, production, and suppliers. Quality is synonymous with excellence in every department of your organization. If you want to achieve success, you need to prioritize quality. The old saying goes, "The devil is in the details." And when it comes to running a successful business, those details can mean the difference between thriving and merely surviving.
So the next time you find yourself walking the halls of one of your company's plants, take a closer look at where the quality department is. Is it nestled comfortably next to the production manager's office or tucked away in some remote corner? And how does it fit into the larger organizational chart?
Similarly, consider your corporate web design or service centre setup: Is a dedicated team responsible for analysing customer feedback and implementing changes to improve the user experience? If not, it may be time to start thinking seriously about the role of continuous improvement in your organization.
After all, if you want to boost revenue, increase profitability, reduce your ecological footprint, or improve your organisation's agility, you need to focus on excellence and continuous improvement. Whether you call it Lean, Six Sigma, TQM, Quality circles, or any of its subsets (such as ToC, Design Thinking, DevOps, or Design for Six Sigma), the key is to make it real for every employee from the top to the bottom of the hierarchical pyramid. It is more than just a buzzword or a checkmark on a corporate governance checklist.
It takes discipline, commitment, and a willingness to embrace change, but the payoff is substantial. By investing in quality and continuous improvement processes and making them a core part of your organization's DNA, you can position yourself for long-term success in an increasingly competitive business landscape.
So, where are you on the quality spectrum?
As always, let’s make it personal with a few questions. How many topics below can you answer with a resounding, fact-based "yes"?
Do you link your Non-conformance reporting (NCR) with distinctive actions and follow up on them via metrics? Does the management board review the summary?
Do you have a common continuous improvement process (TQM, Lean, Six Sigma, etc.) linked to your HR job competency and promotion matrix?
Do you run an employee suggestion process focusing on quality towards the customer?Are the best suggestions celebrated across the company?
Do you believe in your quality reporting, and is it customer-focused? (Or is it like a melon? Green outside, red inside?)
Do you have a quality policy? Has it been updated recently (i.e.… due to the recent changes in digitalization or legislation)?
Is your quality / continuous improvement leader reporting to the managing director / COO?
Do you measure how much of what the customer tells you to fix gets actually fixed?
If you answered „yes“ to most questions, great: you have your quality & continuous improvement probably well under control. Congratulations - well done! Do not read any further. Better to focus on other topics.
However, if there were gaps, you answered “no” or did not know. You have a tremendous opportunity to improve…well, everything!
Size of the prize
Quality & excellence is like sound health. If you have it, you do not think too much about it and take it in your usual way of living. If you don't have it, you are reminded from the morning to the evening that there is a problem.
Therefore, calculating the price size is not simple, depending on how sick your company is.
Companies that have taken quality and continuous improvement culture seriously increase revenues, reduce costs and improve customer satisfaction - getting healthy, in other words.
It is relatively simple. Just do it!
However, if you need more material to familiarize yourself with the concepts, read articles in the Harvard Business Review, Hackett, books, and webpages from strategic consultancies on quality, continuous improvement, excellence, and customer satisfaction.
For me, it is a bit like putting a finger in every stream to see whether the water is still wet…your experience about quality in your personal life can be easily transposed towards your company.
Let the revolution start!
How to set up a ‘quality revolution’?
Time plan:
18-24 months (depending on the lack of current focus). As always, I am not a big fan of 3-5 year projects - business life and the players move on…and you miss out on implementing what you set out for.
Board Sponsor:
CEO / Managing Director: This is “boss territory” - if not, don’t do it!
Lead:
COO / Head of Operations / CFO (never just the Quality Head - it is about the business, not just about product quality)
Blueprint Development:
Visit your plants, visit your customers, visit your suppliers. Allow them to vent. If you do not know how to accomplish this, you are in deep trouble.
Based on the feedback, starting with customers, establish your blueprint for the quality/excellence revolution you like to see. One hint: Do not strive to be second, be first. Even if you are not accomplishing this, is it a good goal to have…or did you start a competition to lose it? If you did, maybe choose a different career path/company.
Project set-up:
Nothing new: Have a good project leader with Lean / Six Sigma or whatever culture you like to go with the background. A weekly task force with clear objectives, monthly reporting on board level by Project Lead with clear output KPI: Training of employees of new/renewed methodology; customers evaluated; improvement projects started (and tracked until completion); product/service changes initiated (in general, not due to the quality initiative); customer retention, customer fluctuations ( I recommend Net Promoter Score (NPS) methodology - keep the same baseline - no shenanigans.)
Sustain success:
Establish KPIs to report customer satisfaction, NCRs, improvement projects, personnel involved, link to revenue & cost numbers
Digitalization/Automation opportunity:
High: The whole methodology should lead to thousands of projects (incl. Customer and employee suggestions), which improve/change the current products & services and the internal processes and organisations. This needs to be tracked in a pipeline/funnel management system. Every idea is valuable, and every implementation is a success that needs celebration. This should be tracked as part of the ERP or any other corporate-wide used system or data lake.
Risk:
HIGH: If you start, you must pull through and stay disciplined. Otherwise, the teams lose even little interest in quality due to the missing focus of management.
Cost:
Medium: Training of personnel, adopting and signing up to a quality/excellence methodology format, building up KPIs, setting up employee suggestion process, adding continuous improvement experts to your teams.
And get a contract with a company that trains your employees mainly online. If you go “Lean”, “six sigma”, or “lean six sigma”, there are fantastic providers just one Google search away.
Watch outs
Blame for past mistakes. Every gap that is found is good. Every gap that is closed is great. Motivation is killed by sentences like: Why has this not been fixed before? It wasn’t, so just let it go and celebrate the success of making it better - continuous improvement.
The blog posts are designed to paint a picture with a broad brush. If you want to dive deeper into a specific topic or need tailored advice, please get in touch with us for an exploratory dialogue.
I had the chance to lead the transformation/revolution of the quality/excellence culture of one of the world's largest power and automation providers as their Head of Operations & Quality. Many excellent colleagues, whom I owe a lot, worked with me for an enterprising board of directors who were up for the challenge after acknowledging the status quo.
I know that if it can be accomplished in a company with 140’000 people, 250 manufacturing plants and a similar amount of construction sites, 1.5 million SKUs - it can be done everywhere.
As we always say: Stay safe and be bold…and start Your quality revolution…
Daniel
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© helmig advisory AG, 2023. All rights reserved.
Stay safe. Be bold.
Daniel
Did you enjoy this blog post? Sign-up for the “Close the Gap” blog and “ The Supply Chain Dialogues” podcast on the helmigadvisory.com webpage, or listen in on Apple Podcasts).
Are you interested in having a dialogue about the above, receiving some advisory support on tackling the topic best in your firm, receiving a structured talk for your team (s), or just having an exploratory call with Daniel? Contact us via the web form or give us a call.
© Helmig Advisory AG, 2023 - All rights reserved.
