Bottom line: All manufacturers are on a quality management journey with many progressing quicker than their competitors, attaining more in just a few years than their competitors attain in a lifetime.
What Sets High Achieving Quality Management Teams Apart From The Rest?
What sets the highest performing manufacturers and the teams that comprise them apart from so many others? What are these teams doing right while many of their competitors waste months and even years of time and effort, not getting the results they need to survive?
The answer can be found in how they are using analytics, tightly integrated manufacturing execution systems (MES), quality management and manufacturing intelligence to drive needed change throughout manufacturing and across the value chains of their businesses. In short, they are armed with excellent data and insights gleaned from an excellent grasp of how quality contributes to customer success, and are on a mission to make their manufacturing strategies the strongest and most effective in their industries.
Stay Hungry For Excelling At Quality Because Complacency Kills
One of the most value lessons learned from studying high performance quality management teams is that complacency kills. Walk the halls of the production operations of manufacturers where high performance quality management teams work and you’ll notice:
- These teams are competing constantly against the best quality levels they’ve attained in the past. High performance quality management teams compete against themselves to reach new levels of performance – not against other departments. They don’t have time for politics, they are too busy trying to beat their previous quality management records.
- Customer-driven quality metrics and data dominate every screen and dashboard. These teams immerse themselves in dashboards and data that show how they are progressing against customers’ quality goals. They use this data to drive needed change throughout their companies, including shifting senior management’s mindset about how to improve quality in manufacturing on a consistent basis.
- Quality management is a team sport to the senior management level. What’s impressive is how these high performance quality management teams find, nurture and strengthen their senior management sponsors who can slice through bureaucracy and make things happen. The highest performing quality management teams seek out champions in the senior management rank regularly, underscoring just how critical quality is to winning and keeping customers.
- Giving everyone in the plant or factory a chance to own quality too. What’s remarkable about these teams is that they deliberately seek to break down the silos that make other quality management teams mediocre. High performance quality management teams work very hard to make sure everyone on the shop floor thoroughly understands what their contribution is to quality.
- Urgency and an impatience to excel at quality. You can feel it on the shop floor of manufacturers that have high performance quality management teams. They anticipate meeting and exceeding customer expectations – they welcome the challenge of excelling beyond their customers’ expectations. Their stories told at break and at lunch revolve around delivering a particularly challenging product at a quality level the customer never expected. In short, they truly kick ass at quality.
Get a great new e-book, Five Strategies For Improving Enterprise Quality Management
At iBase-t we’ve put together an e-book of the top five strategies for improving quality management based on our visits with the highest performing quality management teams in complex manufacturing. You can get a copy here:
