Does a Quality Management System really works?

The article I will write may be controversial, especially for people that work on Organization and Methods areas who believe in what they do. However what I am writing is based in my personal experience, working on this area for many years.

Before I started my own consulting business with my brother, I worked in two of the biggest companies in my country. The first one was on the news sector and the other one on the pension and severance sector. As I just said in both of these companies I worked on the Organization and Methods department.

The Quality Management System supposedly has many benefits because it helps to structure processes and monitor them in order to perform in the best way. I say “supposedly” because unfortunately just few areas of the company really implement it for their advantage. Therefore every time the quality audits are going to visit the different departments of the company you see people running to change their processes in order to adjust them to what they really do and filling in all the papers they had to fill in the period of time that is going to be audited.

I think that a Quality Management System that is handled in this way doesn’t work but I also think that the mistake resides in the organizational culture and perhaps the way in which we sell to the company’s employees the implementation of this system.

They see it as more work and as a process that doesn’t provides value to them. This is the reason why I think that if we really want it to work it must be accompanied by education. When I talk about education I mean teaching the benefits of this type of system. They must learn how they are going to be the first persona benefited when they improve their processes and take care of the quality of them. In other words education not only means the new tasks they must perform with this system but how it can work for their advantage and show them some of the many success cases that exist worldwide.

This education should be performed continually so that they understand, digest it and take ownership. The idea is that the quality subject becomes part of the organizational culture and of the company’s DNA.

I think that only in this way it is good to have a Quality Management System, in other case it is not more than a trend and a seal that we can show. However the idea is that this system brings us many benefits inside our company.

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