John Henderson, co-founder and director of training and development specialist Sara Penrose, continues his series of articles. This time, he focuses on the importance of quality and quality management.
IT IS SOMEWHAT of a cliché to say that quality management should be at the heart of everything a business does. But when we start to dig to get a better understanding of what makes good quality, we start to see why this adage holds so much value.
Quality is associated with understanding what customers and stakeholders want and how we are going to deliver. If we are running a business and we do not understand what customers want, we are likely to get into difficulty.
This forms the first phase of quality: planning. To undertake the background research and preparation before we even start to sell our first unit.
“Quality means we have to consistently meet our customers expectations.”
It sounds rather obvious. Surely, we should understand our customer wants. But history is littered with examples, from the Blackberry phone to Blockbuster Video. Customers’ demands moved forward; the company did not.
So why does this happen? Here are three potential reasons:
Poor identification and harvesting of knowledge from customers.
The relationship between the customer and the supplier is not working as well as it should. The supplier needs to ask questions of the customer about what they want and need. This information should be carefully fostered, nurtured and developed before being transferred to the wider business.
Too often rigid processes affect this relationship, restricting suppliers’ ability to think on their feet and add genuine value to the customer by solving their problem. Maybe the listed solution does not work, but perhaps from another perspective it could be a better fit.
The competitor who can do this and satisfy the customer will win the sale and deepen the relationship.
Poor understanding and communication of customer requirements now and in the future
Gaining the information from listening and questioning forms the basis to understand what the customer wants. Suppliers teams need to analyse and evaluate this information effectively to ensure they are clear on these requirements.
Decisions taken at this stage are vital in the quality process and should be based upon accurate and unbiased information.
Part of the downfall of Blockbuster’s business was the belief of ‘We’ve always done it like this’ and not thehard evidence that was there in the market, clearly indicating customers were changing.
If this is not understood, it makes the already difficult phase of transferring this information to the wider business all the harder. The receiver and the transmitter of this information must be in tune or, to quote a phrase, it could be ‘lost in translation’.
This method of communication should be two-way, with positive checks to ensure accuracy is maintained at all times. Alternatively, imagine the transmitter did not understand what the customer wanted. Then it would make no difference how accurate the transfer was. This leads to waste, cost and lost sales.
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Inability to match requirements against capabilities and realise the value of the product to the customer and the standards needed
Once the customer’s needs have been understood and communicated, this is transformed into a product. Therefore, it is essential that the supplier has the capability to produce. Aircraft manufacturer De Havilland pioneered the passenger jet aircraft in the late 1950s and early 1960s with the Comet – until a structural fault in the design caused several catastrophic accidents.
The constraint was that De Havilland did not have sufficient capability to deliver what the customer wanted – safe air travel- so the market was then lost to Boeing, which did.
Quality means we have to consistently meet our customers expectations. If we do not have sufficient or the right type of capability, we cannot achieve this. If we can link the two, we can start to determine what standards we need in place to ensure we can.
There is also a further point, that we need to be able to communicate the value of a suppliers product to the customer. If we do not know the true value and how it meets the customers needs, we are not likely to win a sale.
There is no substitute for a robust quality management system in a business to monitor and maintain standards. The question is: if we do not know what those standards are in the first instance, how can we set these up?
This information comes from questioning and analysing what the customer is telling us and then creating a solutionthat matches our capabilities. At the heart of all three of these are good fundamental human skills or critical thinking, lateral thinking and problem solving, which can be learned and developed to ensure quality planning is right every time.
John Henderson is co-founder and director of training and development consultancy Sara Penrose Ltd.
