Quality management in manufacturing facilities involves implementing systems and processes to ensure products meet defined standards, improve efficiency, and reduce defects, ultimately enhancing customer satisfaction and lowering costs. This includes the determination of a quality policy, creating and implementing quality planning and assurance, and quality control and quality improvement. Quality management ensures that all the organization’s stakeholders are working together to improve processes, products, services, and culture.
The strategies developed in quality management aim to follow the set plan to achieve the desired outcome.
The management uses these strategies to make sure all tasks and activities are being made as planned. Even though all these strategies have the same goal, every manager builds his own.
Here are 8 strategies often used by top managers:
1- Quality register
Using a quality register is having a reference for every quality activity and a pointer to the product’s quality records. It summarizes all the related management activities that are either planned or completed and provides a summary of the type and number of activities that have been undertaken.
Top managers often use quality registers to keep them updated with the results of quality control operations. Managers use this register as a form of diary for planned activities and events.
Quality registers are created usually when initiating a project, so that all activities are registered properly, and they will serve as a reference for any clarification. It provides key audits needed for the project and assurance information. It also helps identify tasks that have not been done. Without this register, it would be so difficult to keep track of tasks and activities in all projects.
2- Continuous improvement
It is as it says, an ongoing effort of improving services, products, and processes. It is the number one method that top managements use to reduce the wastage of time and effort, as a result, continuous improvement minimizes project costs and helps prevent overages. In some cases, teams cannot practice continuous improvement constantly, rapid improvement events can solve it. These kinds of events can last sometimes up to 5 days based on what it covers. It is also recommended to establish a culture that stresses quality improvement, it helps keep quality management in employees’ minds.
It is important for your organization to become actively involved in continuous improvement, it reflects on your performance and increases your organization’s ability to embrace new opportunities. One easy way to encourage improvement in culture is through rewards. Rewarding employees that show commitment to quality makes them want to improve even more.
Also, continuous improvement helps you create new ways to stay in the market and adopt new market situations.
3- Customer focus
This strategy is focused on satisfying customers and maintaining good relationships with them through customer-focused businesses. Success is when they exceed the needs of their customers and their expectations. To do so, managers should do some effort in following up on some customer service situations, which will help them define areas that require improvement. This will build customer loyalty, thus increasing revenues.
Customer-focused managers are not immune to making mistakes, but they learn from their mistakes and continuously improve their processes to stand out as the best.
4- Effective leadership
Good leadership is at the base of successful businesses. Unity of purpose is provided by good leaders. Good leaders engage employees and lead them towards achieving the organization’s goals. When employees are involved in setting the organization’s goals and objectives, they will be motivated to work on achieving them. Therefore, they will improve their productivity and loyalty. In turn, leaders should be proactive and lead by example. They should also consider the wants of all stakeholders of the business. These include the suppliers, customers, employees, owners, local communities, and the general public. Also, executives should teach, train, and coach employees on improvement strategies and other initiatives. So, effective leadership is not an option if managers want to take their businesses to the next level.
5- Process approach
The process approach is a strategy that involves managing a business as a system of processes. If the top management has a good process, it will have good results. Because producing the right output requires the use of the right input. Though each process is important, it should not be treated individually. The process approach strategy emphasizes achieving efficiency and effectiveness in the organizational processes. If the inputs and outputs of an organization are managed and controlled effectively, quality is assured.
6- People engagement strategy
Whether employees are full-time or part-time, they should be involved in delivering and creating value. Encouraging employees to constantly improve their skills and maintain consistency helps them understand their roles better and makes them more proactive.
But how do you engage employees? You can follow some easy steps:
– Asking for opinions
– Mentoring them
– Discussing their challenges
– Rewarding good performance
– Improving accountability
– Making clear their goals and responsibilities
– Perfecting the onboarding process
– Celebrating World Quality Day
– Providing ongoing training and support
7- Evidence-based decision-making strategy
When making a decision, the top management should consider verified and analyzed data. This helps the business understand the marketplace better. Therefore, the tasks that they perform produce the desired results.
This quality management strategy involves:
– Collecting relevant data and information
– Ensuring that the data and information collected are accurate, reliable, and accessible
– Analyzing this data and information using varied methods
– Using the results of logical analysis and pairing them with intuition and experience to make informed decisions
8- Periodic internal audits
As known, internal auditing is done to ensure compliance with regulations and laws. Successful top managers use internal audits to get tools that are necessary for achieving efficiency by detecting issues and rectifying them early. Audits also help hold executives responsible for the accuracy of financial records. Periodic internal audits help prevent employees from engaging in fraudulent activities. The audit results provide managers with improvement suggestions regarding current processes and operations, which will boost the quality of services and products.
