Success in business requires a winning strategy. That’s because quality and value never happen by accident. They must be pursued with purpose and intentional effort. Many managers and owners know this, but few know where to start when trying to increase quality levels in their business. Without an established gameplan, these businesses may spend significant amounts of energy only to go around in circles.
The good news is, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel in order to improve your offerings to your customers. There is an existing, proven strategy that has helped businesses like Xerox, Toyota, and Ford to maintain high levels of company performance, which directly impacts customer satisfaction.
When seeking to genuinely meet customer needs and maintain high levels of quality, few business strategies are as effective as Total Quality Management (TQM).
TQM Basics
What Is Total Quality Management?
Total Quality Management is a methodology that drives toward the continuous pursuit of the needs of the customer. This holistic strategy focuses on building an organizational culture that fosters perpetual improvement, self-evaluation, and company-wide engagement.
Similar in philosophy to agile software development, success is achieved by delivering a product or service, evaluating to determine what can be improved, making the improvements, delivering the improved version to the customers, and then repeating the cycle. This “gather-see-act-repeat” ideology leads to higher levels of dedication from the team, which in turn leads to a higher-quality product or service delivered to customers.
TQM originated in the 1980s, growing out of business philosophies put into practice by manufacturing companies. Since then, TQM has seen implementation around the world in nearly every sector and has helped many businesses achieve success.
Take AtlantiCare for example. A New Jersey-based healthcare provider that manages 5,000 employees, AtlantiCare sought to improve their $280-million-per-year profits. Patient satisfaction weighs heavily on the healthcare industry, so AtlantiCare stood to gain much by pursuing increased customer satisfaction. So when they implemented the “gather-see-act-repeat” cycle — the hallmark of TQM strategy — they saw their profits more than double to $650 million.
What Are the Advantages of TQM?
TQM comes with a number of distinct benefits. When putting TQM to work, you’re on a path that helps your business pursue a high standard of excellence, which has the coveted tendency to give teams a strengthened sense of purpose. Companies who have used TQM found that most employees will respond by committing wholeheartedly to the endeavor.“When you want to provide a better product, build a better reputation, or be more helpful to your customers, the TQM method pays great dividends.”
TQM also lays the groundwork for constant and continual improvement of your product or services. The methodology is designed specifically to push your performance ever upward, so you can refine your processes with each iteration. This results in another benefit — empowered quality and brand management. Your control over what you offer your customers will increase as your team priorities shift towards making customer-focused decisions.
All of this builds to the most important benefit — increased customer satisfaction. Since you’ve made the customer the foundation of your efforts, you will be serving them better than ever before. As they receive this elevated treatment, they will become more loyal to your business and your brand.
When you want to provide a better product, build a better reputation, or be more helpful to your customers, the TQM method pays great dividends.
TQM in Action
Total Quality Management Principles
Implementation strategies for TQM vary from company to company, but successful plans have certain principles in common:
Senior leadership is committed to the initiative and to building a company culture that fosters the success of TQM.
Making decisions with actionable, measurable data is used to create a plan that enables the organization to meet the needs of the customers.
Team members are empowered to implement TQM and adhere to its principles at their level of the business.
The whole organization engages and works together in pursuit of the common goal: putting the customer first.
The organization pursues perpetual improvement at every level, using a “gather-see-act-repeat” method. (Also known as the “plan-do-check-act” cycle).
In every effort, the focus remains on the customer and what serves them best.
Failure in TQM efforts is usually tied to a lack of adherence to one of these principles. A customer focus and company-wide commitment is crucial for success.
How to Implement TQM
As mentioned above, implementation tactics will vary by organization. But like the principles of TQM, there are certain steps that are common among successful initiatives.
Establish mission, values, and vision.
Map out key processes and subprocesses down to every level of your business.
Identify critical success factors (CSF) and key performance indicators to measure progress.
Identify key customer personas.
Design a high-quality product based on personas.
Deliver the product.
Collect feedback from key customers and employees.
Develop corrective-action plans (or CAPA) for proactive improvement.
Arguably, the most important piece of the TQM model is the use of corrective action/preventive action (CAPA) to create a proactive process. In essence, CAPA is a combination of 1) creating plans that help you solve issues quickly when they arise and 2) creating processes that increase transparency to help prevent problems. CAPA aims to eliminate process errors and noncompliance to industry and government regulations as well as brand standards. It’s rooted in the gather-see-act-repeat cycle and requires a significant amount of evaluation and planning to gain fast and effective execution.
Examples of CAPA plan implementations include preventive maintenance, error proofing, process/product redesign, instituting training programs, and so forth. CAPA plans, and the corrective and preventive actions that go along with them, are crucial if an organization wants to succeed in their quality management process. To learn more about CAPA best practices, check out the article “Preventive and Corrective Action Plans for When Incidents Happen.”
Implementing any of these strategies can feel overwhelming, especially for large organizations. Running a successful initiative requires having and utilizing the right tools. One tool that can make the process run more smoothly is a comprehensive quality management software. With this type of tool, you can automate and streamline much of the process of evaluation and improvement planning. To learn more about how you can improve your process while saving time, talk to the experts at RizePoint.
Improved food quality and supply chain transparency is no longer a behind-the-scenes food safety concern. Consumers are increasingly interested in farm and manufacturing sources, ethical and social responsibilities, and product quality and can force transparency through social media, asking companies in a very public way to answer for unclear or poor supply chain practices. This means manufacturers, distributors, restaurants, and grocery stores are held to a higher standard than ever before.
In order for your food service business to hold onto or see growth within your piece of the market, you need evaluate your supply chain health with a fresh perspective to help you keep up with the ever-changing customer climate and government regulations.
Why Supply Chain Visibility Is Important
From production and manufacturing to distribution and food prep, every part of the supply chain is important. One weak link could mean significant consequences for your customer, your brand, and your bottom line. There are at least three major reasons to work toward better supply chain visibility.
1. The Proactive Advantage
When you achieve total supply chain visibility, you’ll get ongoing assessments of your systems and processes, including transparency of your full production and distribution process. This allows you to immediately see and repair issues in your supply chain before they become large, public-facing problems. In a nutshell, you’re creating a more proactive quality and safety approach. It’s always more effective and economical to fix the small stuff early on rather than react later to fix snowballed problems.
2. Outbreak Protection
A food outbreak could originate in any part of the supply chain, so it’s important that your brand promises of quality and safety are protected each step of the way. With better visibility, you can stop even the smallest noncompliance issues before they have a chance to turn into an outbreak. Think about it this way: It’s comparatively easy and cost-effective to add more training or clarify rules at each stop of your supply chain, but once you veer into recalls, public relations, brand damage, legal actions, and more, nothing is cost-effective or easy.
3. Brand Protection
Of course, your number one concern is protecting your customers from foodborne disease. However, your business also relies on its strong brand to keep loyal customers and to expand further into your market. As you gain total supply chain visibility, you can more consistently deliver on all your brand promises and build customer trust. You’ll better see when suppliers and vendors are not meeting your brand standards or maintaining FSMA compliance, which means you’ll have more control over the quality and safety of your final product. That kind of control is invaluable to protecting your brand and your customers.
How to Deepen Supply Chain Visibility
“The best way to reduce the risk of supply chain failure is by achieving greater visibility, and managing it cross-functionally deeper into the end-to-end supply chain.”
—Erich L. Gampenrieder, Global Head of Operations Advisory, KPMG International
The short answer to better end-to-end supply chain visibility is technology. As globalization, government regulations, industry demands, and customer expectations expand or change, your processes must evolve to keep up. In food safety, this means turning to a cloud-based quality management software (QMS) that helps you easily manage every data point and automate as much as possible.
Beyond the clear advantages of using a QMS — including centralized data, automated supplier workflows, and easy reporting — there is also a simple process to help you gain total quality management across your supply chain and your entire business.
1. Gather meaningful data when introducing new processes or tweaking existing ones. 2. See weak links in your process and evaluate what needs to change. 3. Act to implement changes and improve your process. 4. Repeat continually to improve your insights, compliance, and processes.
When you use this basic framework, you can leverage your supply chain visibility into better insights and processes for your business. First, when new industry, government, or internal standards arise, this process will help you and your suppliers adapt more quickly. Second, with this adaptive mindset, all departments and employees will already have the tools to pivot easily. And last, you will create a culture that values questions and change, which helps employees at every level feel invested in guarding the quality and safety of your product.
Audits, assessments, evaluations, surveys, and inspections: no matter what you call them, they are necessary for your multi-location or franchised food service business. You need to track everything from food safety compliance to brand compliance to customer experience. It’s a huge undertaking to gather and interpret data in meaningful ways across dozens to thousands of locations.
Papa Murphy’s, the take-n-bake pizza giant, knew that pain. Before 2012, the company was conducting audits and surveys across all 1,500 of their locations with pen, paper, and spreadsheets. With this manual method, each survey took eight hours and over two days to complete. It was a long and operationally expensive process that produced inconsistent and error-prone reports several weeks after an audit.
To solve these problems, Papa Murphy’s used their existing audit and reporting processes within RizePoint’s audit and quality management software. This move allowed them to gather and store audit data digitally, shaving two hours off each survey and eliminating all overnight stays for the auditors. Additionally, results and reporting became immediately available to the home office and the store owners after each survey, which led to more benefits for the company:
Faster identification of trends at a system level, division level, and city level
Faster pivots in necessary operational changes for store owners, market coaches, and home office
Better quality and brand alignment over 1,500 locations
Easier quality and brand alignment during onboarding for new storeowners.
So much of modern life relies on trusting companies to manage their processes responsibly. As consumers, we expect that our interactions with commerce will include quality and safety measures for ourselves, our money, and our information. We eat at restaurants trusting that our health is safe, we put our money in banks trusting that our money is safe, and we conduct business on the internet trusting that our data is safe.
The commonality behind these examples (and many, many more) is compliance management. In other words, every business is trying to meet certain rules and maintain certain standards. Those rules may come from the government, industry standards, company brand standards, and even from consumers themselves. But whether the standard is low or high, there is virtually always a standard that a company is trying to meet.
Industry leaders are turning to quality management software (QMS) to gain better compliance management for several reasons. With a comprehensive QMS, virtually any company in any industry can manage all its operational and experiential data in one place, run reports in seconds, automate processes to save time, and gain a complete visibility into all channels.
When you use a robust QMS such as RizePoint, you also get a system that is flexible and customizable to your industry and your existing processes. It’s all about giving you the tools you need enhance your business, not forcing you to conform to a system that’s limited or too generalized to help.
As an example, PeopleMetrics recently posted about NIST 800-171 compliance, which is a system that helps the government and higher education manage and control “unclassified information in nonfederal information systems and organizations.” In other words, the government shares sensitive information with higher education institutions, and that information needs to be protected. The standards for NIST compliance has 14 categories and 109 separate controls, which is a lot of rules to track and assess across a large, multifaceted organization that deals with a constant influx of information.
PeopleMetrics suggested that RizePoint’s compliance management software solution is comprehensive enough to handle this complex and unique use case in ways that will help institutions stay compliant with ease while saving time and resources.
The article states, “Higher-education institutions can significantly reduce the cost and time associated with enforcing compliance by automating their own assessment of the NIST 800-171 controls. … Rizepoint’s platform automates the management of these controls, which significantly reduces resource requirements while improving the quality of the control.”
Whatever industry you work in, RizePoint has a solution to help you manage your quality and compliance performance. Visit RizePoint.com to learn more.
If you’re still using old filing cabinets and paper files, it’s time to go digital and start using quality management software to keep track of your quality records. Follow these five steps to help digitize and organize your quality records.
1. Scan & Upload Documents
The first step to digitizing your quality records is scanning them. Whether you scan them one by one in your office or hire a scanning service, it will be worth the effort and expense. You won’t lose time searching through messy file cabinets — in fact, searching for documents will be easier than ever. When it comes to storing your freshly scanned documents, consider quality management software with cloud storage and document management features. This way your records will be available from anywhere you have an internet connection.
2. Use Detailed Naming Conventions
Ultimately, you will need to come up with a naming system that makes the most sense for you and your team. Here are some basic guidelines that will help you find the right files quickly and eliminate confusion:
● Be as specific as possible ● Resist abbreviations ● Include the date
Remember, the ultimate goal is to make sure you can quickly find the document you need on a digital platform. Consider how you will search for the document in both the near future and for months to come. You can learn more about file naming conventions at the Purdue University Libraries website.
3. Organize Files by Content Type & Date
As you name files, you’ll also want to consider file organization. To ease the transition into digitizing quality records, you may decide to use the same system you used with your hard copies and filing cabinets, but if you’d like to start fresh, try organizing your files by content type or chronological order.
4. Re-evaluate Your System
Once you’ve had your new digital filing system in place for a few weeks, go back and take a look at each section and category and evaluate whether your new system has helped you become more efficient. You might find that some digital folders contain more files than others and need to be split into two separate categories for ease of finding documents. Alternatively, some folders may have only one or two documents that could be combined into other digital folders.
5. Make Organizing a Priority
Organization requires time and consistency, but it is possible to minimize the burden. Instead of spending a few hours each month organizing your digital files, try dedicating a few extra seconds to making sure you’re using correct naming conventions. If your file names are consistent, you’ll find documents quickly — whenever you need them.
Click here to see if switching to software that includes streamlined document management is right for you.
The food industry is full of iconic couples: peanut butter and jelly, hamburgers and fries, cookies and milk — just to name a few. But a new food pairing has arrived, and this match made in heaven will go down in food safety history — Bluetooth thermometers and auditing apps. Conducting line checks with thermocouple tech solves several problems in the context of food safety and audit apps. Here are four reasons to add this pairing to your internet of things at your restaurant, convenience store, or grocery store.
1. Accurate Data Gathering
You’ll add extra food safety security when you conduct line checks with Bluetooth thermometers paired with the right audit software. Temperatures automatically upload into the audit form, which means you’ll eliminate auditor errors and make results tamper resistant. It’s a reliable system that mitigates food-safety risks and helps each location stay compliant.
2. Time-saving Tech
All line checks — from self-audits to yearly audits — will be a little faster when you add Bluetooth thermometers and audit app pairing to your internet of things as the need to manually write down or enter times into a form or spreadsheet disappears. This means there’s less downtime between readings, so line checks are finished faster. Location managers will save time, so they can do more in their stores and focus on the issues that need their attention most.
3. Real-time Reporting
Since everything syncs automatically with integrated auditing apps, managers will receive real-time reports. This includes immediate alerts for items that fail to meet regulations, so any temperature-related noncompliance issue can be corrected immediately. It’s a proactive way to stop food safety issues before they start, and you’ll ultimately reduce risk and better protect your customers.
4. Long-term Recordkeeping
If your compliance management software offers analytics and makes your data searchable, you’ll be able to effortlessly compile and pull line check reports for each location. You can also refer back to past line checks to see the compliance history or if temperatures have been manually changed. This will help managers better determine training needs and other corrective actions.
Learn more about RizePoint Inspect thermocouple integrationshere.
