What a Quality Strategy Can Do for Your Business
A good business can recognise when their customers need and want change. And as our world is becoming more focused on quality products made in socially conscious ways, consumers are increasingly looking for companies who are creating quality with a socially responsible mentality. Because at the end of the day, it takes a long time to build your brand image, but only a moment to destroy it.
To explain what a quality strategy can do for your business this article will discuss:
- Quality Failure
- How to Implement a Quality Strategy in Your Company
- Can You Live Without a Quality Strategy?
- Get More From Your Business
Quality Failure
So how dangerous can neglecting quality be? The answer to this question is…devastating.
The 2008 financial crisis is considered by Paul Moore (former head of group regulatory risk at HBOS) to be the “greatest quality failure of all time”. He was given his marching orders in 2004 for warning senior executives about the dangers of taking risks. It seemed this was an unpopular message because after the smoke cleared, it emerged that Moore was the only senior risk and compliance executive in the UK who spoke out publicly.
Tech giant Samsung left quality behind after rushing out their new Note 7 Smartphone to compete with Apple’s latest iPhone release. When it was discovered that the new smartphone’s battery had a tendency to overheat and catch fire, Samsung discontinued production and recalled phones already sold. This catastrophic blunder in quality control has led to a forecast in losses totalling somewhere in the neighbourhood of $5 billion.
It’s not just time and money that's at risk either. In 2010 Toyota’s removable floor mats caused the accelerator to stick and led to 52 deaths and a recall of 9 million cars in the US.
The business world is littered with these stories. For some businesses, quality failure could have more serious impacts than others, but the fact of the matter Is, you’ve spent years building this brand, why not spend some time and energy to protect it?
How to Implement a Quality Strategy in Your Company
An increase in quality management won’t be achieved overnight, but it will be achieved as long as it becomes a core strategy at the heart of your organisation.
You have to be willing to implement processes and documentation that focus on quality and ensure that it’s upheld in every area of the company, while creating a culture where changes can be made to your systems when they are required.
With this in mind, here are some important factors you should implement when creating your quality strategy:
- Understand the processes of your company as they are currently in order to understand how they can be improved.
- Create a risk assessment for all areas of the company, so you can see any potential danger
- Create a quality team responsible for making sure standards remain high
- Have a top down acceptance of quality as a core value of the organisation
- Encourage employees to produce quality work
- Assign someone involved with the process to keep an eye on consistency
- Make quality part of every employees job description
Can You Live Without a Quality Strategy?
The short answer is yes, you can. The longer answer is, it depends on how much you like gambling.
You might have gotten along fine so far without a quality strategy, but at the end of the day the risks might be too high not to have one in place and while it’s probably not ideal living without a quality strategy, it’s pretty ideal living with one. That’s because having a quality strategy will actually support your company by:
- Creating brand loyalty
- Protecting your brand name
- Helping you become a leader in your field
- Turning your company into an inspiring place to work for your employees (Knowing that you produce the best product for your customers tends to satisfy employees)
- Minimising risk
Get More From Your Business
Triaster has been at the forefront of Quality Management for a long time. We know the value of placing quality at the centre of your business processes as do our customers.