Seven major causes of failure that guarantee the downfall of quality management!

Thread Content

Quality is the lifeblood of a company, and its importance goes without saying. However, in actual production and operations, quality is often not the lifeblood of a company but rather a trivial factor; even those companies that have obtained the so-called ISO 9000 series certifications have a quality management system that does not live up to its name ； Although ISO represents only the minimum standards for quality management in enterprises, many companies fail to meet even these basic requirements, and this is why such enterprises generally have weak viability! Companies without quality or good quality management are doomed to be short-lived. What is the reason why the life tree of a company does not remain evergreen? Based on the author’s many years of experience in quality management, the common causes of failure in quality management include: a lack of vision among senior management. Vision refers to the ability to see into the future and determine what kind of company it should become; it enables one to identify potential opportunities and set goals, reflecting realistically the benefits that can be achieved in the future. Vision provides the direction in which a company should develop, how it should formulate action plans, and the organizational structure and systems required to implement those plans. A lack of vision leads to quality being excluded from strategies, resulting in unclear corporate goals and priorities, and making it difficult to understand the role of quality within the company. To achieve success through effort, companies need to change their way of thinking and create an environment for continuous quality improvement. Whether the corporate leadership regards brand quality as the foundation for the company’s survival determines the level of quality management in the enterprise. The author has found that today’s corporate executives prefer to focus on procurement and equipment, ignoring quality and safety. Especially for the top leader, when foreign clients conduct evaluations, they first look at the company’s organizational structure and the importance that quality holds in the eyes of the management. If it is found that quality is no longer under the direct attention and control of the company’s top executive, there is an immediate downward assessment of the company’s quality management, and facts do indeed prove that this is correct. In companies where the boss changes every few years, the top leader lacks vision; making money becomes the primary goal! Companies that are not customer-centered and are arrogant have, as their first flaw, an overconfident and arrogant attitude. In such companies, the owners focus only on immediate benefits and their own interests, without caring whether customers are satisfied or not, or whether value is being created for them. They use various tactics to deceive and tempt customers; once they achieve their goals, they pay no attention to the customers’ feelings, and quality is not a concern for them. As a result, customers naturally do not become a focus for the company. Companies have a weak awareness of customer service; they are self-centered and often adopt an attitude as if \"a princess doesn’t need to worry about finding a husband.\" Whether your customers buy or not, what does it have to do with me? After securing an order, they fail to analyze the requirements outlined in the contract or the customer’s specific expectations; instead, they continue production using traditional methods, ignoring the customer’s complaints and requests. Some companies even go against the customers’ wishes, saying, \"That’s just the way it is\" – like a dead pig that isn’t afraid of being scalded! Sometimes they still pick faults with customers! Managers lack sincerity in improving quality. Surveys show that the failure of most quality management efforts is due to managerial rather than technical reasons. All quality management experts agree on one thing: the biggest obstacle to quality management is the lack of contribution from senior management in quality improvement. The contribution of managers lies in communicating the company’s vision from top to bottom through action, ensuring that all employees and all activities are focused on continuous improvement – this is a practical approach. Merely talking or giving public speeches is not sufficient for quality management; managers must be involved in every aspect related to quality management and maintain this involvement on a continuous basis. In a survey, 70% of production managers admitted that their companies are now spending more time improving factors related to customer satisfaction. However, they delegate these responsibilities to middle managers, so it is unclear whether these efforts are successful or not. Imagine, can such quality management be successful? Quality training lacks specificity and purpose. Companies spend a lot of money on training for quality management, yet many of them do not see any fundamental improvements as a result. Because too much quality management training is irrelevant. For example, employees learned about control charts but didn’t know where to use them, and soon they forgot what they had learned. It can be said that targeted training without goals or priorities is essentially a waste, and it is also one of the factors contributing to quality management failures. Meaningful training must resonate with employees’ hearts and prompt them to think about quality; in particular, targeted training conducted promptly in response to quality accidents and incidents that occur on the factory floor will yield the best results. Lack of quality cost and benefit analysis: Many companies neither calculate quality costs nor the benefits of improvement projects. Even those that do calculate quality costs often focus only on the obvious, visible costs (such as guarantees) and those that are easy to quantify (such as training expenses), while completely ignoring the key costs associated with it, such as sales losses and the intangible cost of customer churn. Some companies fail to calculate the potential benefits brought about by quality improvement. For example, not being aware of the potential sales losses resulting from customers leaving. Foreign studies have shown that dissatisfied customers tell 22 people about their dissatisfaction, while satisfied customers only tell 8 people about their satisfaction. Reducing the customer churn rate by 5% can increase profits by 25%~95%, while increasing customer retention by 5% can boost profits by 35%~85%. Only the quality costs associated with inputs are taken into account, while the additional costs resulting from quality incidents and mistakes are not considered ； The other extreme is to neglect to understand the customer’s technical quality requirements and to pursue absolute quality unilaterally, which can lead to unnecessary cost increases. Ugly organizational structures, bizarre work instruction diagrams; organizational structure, measurement, and compensation do not receive attention in quality management training and outreach. If a company still has cumbersome bureaucratic layers and siloed departments, no amount of quality management training will be useful. In some companies, the role of managers is not clear, and responsibility for quality management is often assigned to middle-level managers. This leads to power struggles among quality teams, which lack an overall understanding of quality, resulting in disputes and chaos. A flat structure, delegation of authority, and cross-departmental collaboration are essential for the success of quality management. Successful companies maintain open forms of communication, develop communication throughout the entire process, and eliminate barriers between departments. Research shows that decentralized cross-departmental teams can achieve quality improvement results that are 200% to 600% higher than those achieved by in-departmental teams. Unclear instruction diagrams in the work process, or overlapping authorities, can result in quality responsibilities being passed back and forth like a ball, preventing their effective implementation. Audit organizations lack the capacity for effective internal audits, which thus become a mere formality. Monitoring and evaluating an enterprise’s audits – including both internal and external audits – shows that top management does not pay enough attention to the process of self-improvement; they rarely or never participate in the company’s internal audits. This is a key reason why various departments fail to give due importance to audits, and why improvements suggested as a result of audits, as well as the resolution of non-conformities, are delayed or handled carelessly, thereby significantly reducing the effectiveness of audits Companies need performance measurement tools related to quality improvement, including process metrics and outcome metrics. Successful companies measure and monitor the process of quality improvement based on customers. Failing to proactively address customers’ regular complaints and suggestions is pointless; no matter how many superficial internal audits are conducted, it won’t help. The maintenance of an enterprise’s quality system does not depend on the number of internal audits conducted, but rather on whether all employees in the company prioritize the continuous improvement of work quality. In companies where senior management does not pay attention to daily customer complaints and internal audits, the effectiveness of quality initiatives will not be very good. Source: Internet