Everyone prefers high-quality products and services. But in some industries, quality is non-negotiable. For example, there’s no margin for error in regulated markets that must meet strict safety standards such as healthcare, food, and electrical goods. Failure to provide your customers with quality products can trigger external audits, product recalls, or a surge in returns. Additionally, these types of issues add to the workload of internal teams, create legal liability, and can cripple a company’s resources and financial performance. With such a significant and visible impact on both top- and bottom-line performance, why do so many organizations struggle? Shouldn’t everyone be proactively measuring and improving quality?
How are you doing—really?
Product design, procurement, manufacturing, supply chain, risk mitigation, and customer service systems all generate important quality information. And, if you’re like most companies, you have more than one of each of those systems. The average company can easily identify at least ten siloed systems that contain critical quality data.
To see how your company is doing, ask these questions:
- How do customers perceive the quality of your products and services?
- Do you have visibility into quality across all relevant dimensions of product and service delivery?
- Does quality data span your product lifecycle—from product requirements and definition to sourcing and procurement to manufacturing (internal and/or external) all the way through to customer service and product returns?
- Do you measure quality performance across all internal and external domains that affect products and services?
- Do you have a consistent, standards-driven process for evaluating and responding quickly when quality events arise?
- Have supply chain disruptions had an adverse impact on the quality of your product and services?
What to do?
Some companies attempt a home-grown approach to address the issues these questions expose. They try to weave together data from multiple silos. But most discover that this approach ends in confusion because it is so difficult to settle on the correct “source of truth,” overcome data latency problems, and reconcile inconsistencies across systems.
Fusion Apps can help
Compare that to the way Oracle Fusion Cloud Quality Management integrates, standardizes, and systematizes standards-driven quality best practices. By eliminating data and process silos, Oracle Quality delivers a current, accurate, shared view of quality across key domains including design, procurement and sourcing, inventory, and other supply chain processes. It consolidates and shares critical, quality-related data for:
- Items and bills of materials
- Product changes
- Test specifications and inspections
- Standard operating procedures, risks, and audits
- Suppliers, customers, and manufacturers
Oracle Quality’s purpose-built, enterprise-grade integrations, workflows, and analytics makes it possible to prevent and correct quality events across all stages of the product lifecycle. This improves productivity and safety, and it ultimately lifts financial performance.
Translating risk into success
Quality improvement initiatives sometimes feel politically daunting. They can be perceived as bureaucratic overhead. Unwavering executive sponsorship can help by removing stumbling blocks and driving the necessary cross-organizational changes to processes and mindsets that are required to be successful. But there’s an equally impactful, alternative approach: adding agreed-upon metrics and data-driven facts to the conversation. Quality teams can achieve the same results by systematizing quality data, processes, and metrics one organization at a time. Building consensus on shared metrics and processes incrementally creates trust and credibility over time, typically earning an invitation to expand initiatives into adjacent organizations and a seat at the table in the pursuit of business success.
Related posts you might like
- The surprisingly high cost of bad product data
- Don’t just fix your finance data. Fix all your data.
- 4 reasons to unify data on Fusion Accounting Hub
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