Author: Eric

You can discover below in English ,the article published May,20 in the French media RHinfos,

For the French version , follow the link : https://www.rhinfo.adp.com/rhinfo/2021/la-qualite-aujourdhui-pour-quoi-faire/

The Quality today, to do what?

The Quality, a priority for the performance, the competitiveness and to face the upcoming challenges

Written by Eric Balligand (President, EQualEx consulting ,Lyon ) & Christophe Coupé (Director for Organizational Performance Practice at Inspearit , Paris) 

The quality doesn’t look like as a priority!

It seems provocative but it is based on a collection of a facts regarding three main aspects: the products and service, the organization and the culture.

Indeed, as a customer in our daily life, we’re all perceiving that the quality of the products is decreasing year after year: the durability of the “white products” is not anymore what it was in the past, car manufacturers are stuck with huge recall campaign on a regular base, food scandals are quite common ,  without mentioning plane failures and some accidents… it is too much ! On top of that, to manage the growing customer dissatisfaction, aftersales activities have developed their business as hell (often in low cost countries) with a success not tangible!

At the heart of the organizations, following merger-acquisitions, quality step back is visible. The Quality is not any more a level-1 function and less and less Quality directors are part of the executive committees. At the same time, companies are losing huge Quality competence with retirement or « natural » leaves not replaced for a generation mainly raised to Japanese culture. 

Finally, the Quality culture is not any longer appealing. We have lost the famous “right first time” motto and a new culture of “the almost good” is growing slowly. Competition and short-term profits are urging the companies to be the first on the market without spending the right time to deliver a mature product!

Multiple challenges to come for the companies

At the same time, we are facing a depressive and unstoppable downturn of the Quality, companies have to cope with a lot of new challenges.

The customers are becoming more and more demanding, forcing to a constant effort in research, innovation and development. Globalization and digitization are leading to major changes in the way we are organizing the companies. The worldwide growth of the population, very different from one continent to another one, with an aging of the European one obliged to adapt offers. On top of that, companies have to prepare the (expected) exit of the Covid crisis, in a context where to take care of the societal and environmental responsibilities as the climate urgency is a must. There is no choice for the companies whatever their size, transformation is needed to improve the performance but by keeping people at the heart of the organizations.

Looking at the nature and the number of upcoming issues, the challenge will require a global transformation, much bigger compared to what we have known so far. We are not talking about continuous improvements of one business Unit or one department, we need to learn how to embrace the change and to create performing learning organizations at the scale of a company.

The Quality function : the perfect  lever to succeed 

To survive this mutation, companies are engaging themselves in a scale transformation, involving all activities, all employees and all stakeholders. We start seeing coming ambitious change management initiative: to change the company model to do better, faster, in line with the overall strategy, the social and environmental responsibilities… this strategical project has to be steered from the top, at the highest level in the company. As global and transversal, only a function with this characteristic can lead and drive it on behalf of the CEO.

As a matter of fact, the definition and the drive of such transformation can be awarded to the Quality Division. We can use this opportunity to rename it, to integrate the notion of Performance or Excellence as it is already the case in some companies. The Quality function is truly global, transversal and owns the skills and knowledge to achieve such challenge.

The Quality urgency and the priorities

We cannot wait any longer, the transformation journey must be initialized shortly. The mandate has to be given to the Quality division with a clear priority to start with: back to basics, a thorough transversal analysis of the non-quality costs has to be engaged, in parallel of a diagnosis about the maturity of the organization towards the “new” best practices.

All the organizations want to perform, to be agile, to be resilient …. But what are we really talking about? What is not performing, agile? Why and where are we not resilient? What is the real cost of this non-quality on a financial perspective for sure but also at the human level? This ground and factual analysis is the mandatory starting point which will make even more sense linked with what we are calling the “maturity diagnosis”.

This report must be known and shared with the Executive committee. It will be the foundation for a real dynamic to transform and initialize the change management journey, involving all the Men and Women of the company, to end with the “almost good” policy and drive again on the road to Excellence!