World Quality Week 2021
As a proud supporter Capella will be celebrating World Quality Week 2021, from the 8th-12th November 2021. The focus this year is on sustainability and how Quality plays a part in this.
Sustainability: improving our products, people, and planet.
At Capella we know that it’s important for quality professionals to consider their social responsibilities when it comes to a sustainable future. For World Quality Week 2021, Bal Gill, at Forefront Certification, explains how Sustainability in organisations can be improved using a quality perspective:
“Utilising quality tools, and approaches developed to address organisational challenges, would have an improved alignment between corporate social responsibility and quality functions to drive business performance.”
Bal supports Capella to deliver the Quality modules of the Level 4 Quality Practitioner programme which includes learning about ISO 9001:2015 Quality management. Identifying risks and opportunities in an organisation’s environment to action and address.
She says “Apprentices acquire an understanding of the interaction of a quality system supporting organisations to be effective in areas of economic (profit), social (people) and ecological (planet) environment”.
“The Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle is one of the most utilised tools, which has grown towards a natural way of thinking. The principle of quality:
‘Evidence Based Decision Making’ is ‘to measure is to know’.
Therefore, measurable, preferably quantitative, quality indicators are essential to manage business performance in a dynamic environment, with varying needs and expectations, from different internal and external stakeholders”.
Bal knows that Quality systems have supported organisations to become more capable of the delivery quality, good customer services and minimising mistakes. “Improving becomes a daily practice to maintain quality. This also means that sustainability can be incorporated in the core processes for organisations and connects to a crucial stakeholder: its customer”.
She believes that conducting audits drives continual improvements and helps businesses to run better, to meet stakeholder needs and expectations. “The audit module in the Level 4 Quality Practitioner programme, provides apprentices with the understanding of why internal audits are essential. Audits assess conformance or non-conformance of an organisation’s processes and systems to ensure consistent products and services meet customers, as well as applicable statutory and regulatory, requirements”.
For an organisation’s business efficiency and effectiveness, utilising a quality perspective such as identifying the cost impact for:
– waste material,
– energy,
– customer dissatisfaction,
– product and service performance
can advance on the requirement for controlling sustainability.
Common quality tools for example: check sheets, control charts, histograms, process flow charts and pareto charts applied to social and environmental issues, can explore the issues in organisations to support its corporate social responsibilities with stakeholders.
Integrated management systems of quality, environmental, health and safety, social responsibility, business continuity and many more standards are all a systems approach, encouraging businesses to develop tools to measure and demonstrate improvements to drive business value, demonstrate Return on Investment and create internal alignment. And that is why…