Why quality?

Quality is an organisation-wide approach that focuses on improving value for customers, the organisation and its stakeholders, and encompasses reliability, integrity, delivery and risk. Organisations compete in the global market using price and brand, and quality is fundamental to both.

The CQI defines quality in terms of innovation and care. The innovation of improved products and services, and of the processes that create and deliver them to the customer. And care not only for the current and future needs of our customers, but also for our employees, suppliers, partners and our environment.

Managing risk

Quality is fundamental to the effective management of business risk. Which of these risks are relevant to your organisation?

• failure in the quality of your product or service
• not identifying trends in customer needs
• not meeting customer, legal or industry requirements
• your product or service harming an individual, society or the environment
• suppliers compromising your product or service quality, or delivery
• losing customer data or property
• your product or service becoming too expensive for the target market

Quality addresses all of these risks and more by providing tools and approaches that deliver value and results. Whether your focus is on improving business efficiency, managing risk or understanding customer needs, the quality discipline can help.

The tools and techniques

Below is a sample of quality tools and approaches you can use to manage risk and deliver customer value. This is an example of what makes up the quality discipline overall. Visit the CQI Body of Quality Knowledge portal to find out more.

Principles of quality

• Customer focus
  Delivering customer value while anticipating future needs and potential markets
• Leadership and business results
  Providing vision and direction, gaining commitment and achieving collective results
• People and organisational culture
  Delivering maximum value through development and involvement of individuals working in a productive organisational culture
• Systems thinking
  Managing interrelated processes with an integrated approach
• Business process management
  Delivering results through business processes to increase efficiency
• Fact-based decision making
  Ensuring good decision making by using accurate data and facts
• Continual improvement
  Making performance improvement a perpetual objective
• Suppliers and partners
  Maintaining mutually beneficial relationships to enable value creation

Tools for quality

• Governance tools
  To ensure transparent and effective governance and to address social responsibility
• Customer tools
  To create a customer focused culture and to measure customer satisfaction
• Project planning tools
  To ensure that quality is addressed at product/service development stage
• Creativity tools
  To channel creative energy into innovation and improvement of products and services and their delivery mechanisms
• Root cause analysis tools
  To identify the root causes of problems and determine optimum solutions
• Process analysis tools
  To analyse process performance and identify improvements
• Statistical data collection and analysis tools
  To collect and analyse process data so that decisions are based on accurate data and facts

Approaches to quality

• Quality management systems
  The foundation of quality. The focus is on the application of the principles of quality to establish a system designed to achieve the organisation's aims and goals, manage exposure to risk and deliver value to customers
• EFQM - Excellence Model
  A model against which organisations can measure and benchmark themselves in terms of quality and excellence
• Six sigma
  A fact-based approach to quality improvement through defect prevention, delivering value by reducing variation and waste wherever they exist. Focuses on bottom line improvement.
• Lean
  A system for the elimination of all non-value-adding activities and waste from the business. This is extended through the entire value stream or supply chain.

The quality professional

Quality is everybody's business, but cannot be left to just anyone. To get the best out of quality approaches and tools, organisations must make an investment to develop or employ the expertise of a quality professional.

The Chartered Quality Institute gives you:

• Quality professionals - gain professional recognition and support by becoming a member of the CQI
• Training courses - train in specific areas of quality
• Qualifications - study for a nationally recognised qualification for quality practitioners

Visit www.thecqi.org for more information.