WINNING WITH QUALITY: CAPABILITY BUILDING IN QUALITY MANAGEMENT

BY

OLANIYI OPANUGA, (President/Chairman of Council)  PhD, FNIPM, FMI, FIoMD, FSCQM

NIGERIAN INSTITUE OF PRODUCTION MANAGEMENT

INTRODUCTION

At the NIPM SOCIETY OF CERTIFIED QUALITY MANAGEMENT (SCQM) wining means achieving cooperate victory or brand success in a competitive environment.

Capability building is an ongoing process of training, learning and improvement of knowledge, skills, behaviours and competencies to enable an individual perform his or her job effectively, efficiently and satisfactorily.

Quality wins all the time. With quality you can never go wrong. Quality is a key element of corporate strategy of world class organizations. Quality is a measure of success being a key weapon of competitive warfare and a source of competitive advantage. Quality is a philosophy, a practice and a race without a finishing line. The hearts and minds of the consumers can be won on the  strength of quality but woe betides an organization whose products and service quality levels are allowed to go below that of its competitors.

Quality is meeting the expectations of the customer or end user of a good or service without falling short of standards set by appropriate industry, institutions or organizations. Quality is the sign post of excellence and reliability.

Today, notable organizations are not only increasing training budgets for quality managers and teams they also adopt or develop innovations and new technologies embodying quality and echoes about total quality management (TQM) and Lean Six Sigma seem to be getting louder. From Toyota to Motorolla and General Electric, Xerox, Ford, Chrysler, Disney, UPS, Intel and others, international and multinational companies are jostling to be “best in class” by listening to tempo of the market gauges, institutionalizing the process of a continuous improvement, reducing the number of defects per billion products (not per million any longer), benchmarking superior performance of other organizations and relentlessly and aggressively pursuing innovation, all in a bid to satisfy the increasingly volatile markets and competing profitably in a increasingly dynamic global business environment.

Customer loyalty which is a critical index cannot be secured without consistent quality and reliability. Quality being a degree to which a process, product or service satisfies a given set of requirements is a major determinant of long-term survival, profitability and growth of any organization. Therefore, as a quality practitioner, you need to constantly and continually check the characteristics, attributes and variables of your offerings whether they have the ability to meet the expressed or implied needs of your internal and external customer. If there are variations or inconsistencies, do something about it, fast!

Case histories show how strong and leading organizations bounced back to market leadership positions from the position of near collapse, despair and close to bankruptcy with zero long0term prospects by carefully and methodically getting to the root of the problems.

Nigerian manufacturers need to learn to invest in human capital training and development. Training should not be seen as an expense but as an investment in capability building and professional development of the workforce. You don’t expect to roll out quality products and services with low quality managers and employees. Training and re-training is vital to performance and motivation. When the managers and workers are properly and adequately trained they will be able to learn from their own faults, the mistakes of others, close performance gaps and achieve high standards through continuous improvements. Part of what we do at the Nigerian Institute of Production Management (NIPM) Society of Certified Quality Management (SCQM) is to meet regularly, compare notes and find ways to help organizations improve quality. We know that organizations attempt to improve product and service quality through automation. Yes, labour and other costs will come down, efficiency and volume will increase but we must not forget that the human factor remains constant. Human beings are still required to operate automated systems. Planning, decision-making, control, co-ordination and strategizing are human functions. Skilled employees will be required. Automation creates demand for skilled production, maintenance and quality technicians, engineers and managers with new roles and responsibilities. It still boils down to the same issue: building capability and training. You cannot automate or introduce sophisticated machines and equipment without training your workforce.

The Society for Certified Quality Management (SCQM) of NIPM’s, Quality & Reliability Consulting Team supports organization on how to use roadmap to a culture of quality improvement and train quality personnel on Quality Control, Quality Assurance, Total Quality Management (TQM) and Six Sigma and help organizations improve their Quality Management Systems (QMS) for manufacturing excellence and overall business success.

Get your factory to run on control systems for operating your laboratory processing, packaging, storage and internal logistics equipment and introduce robots. You can level the playing field in global manufacturing because you can be more efficient. For instance, with programmable logic controllers (PLCs) or programmable controllers (PCs) adapted for your production lines to ensure consistent quality and reliability in industrial electro-mechanical processes, you can reduce manufacturing lead times, eliminate human errors, improve consistency, accuracy and safety, streamline production processes and reduce waste etc.  You can also improve your quality management system; achieve greater efficiency, accuracy, standardization and safety through automation of laboratories. Your data quality, laboratory process cycle times reduction, productivity are performance indicators. Hence, automation will make the job seamless for microbiologists, chemist technologists and other quality personnel. But, remember professional training and capability building is key.