The Quality Hub Podcast
Listen Below. Learn More.
ISO Certification – Maturing your QMS
Episode 10
Episode 10 – ISO Certification – Maturing Your QMS
On this episode of The Quality Hub our guest Suzanne Weber-Smatko delves into the challenges of maturing a Quality Management System after receiving ISO certification. As an expert in the field, she discusses the importance of enhancing a QMS to ensure ongoing compliance and effectiveness and the crucial roles that leadership and employee engagement play in achieving this.
Core Business Solutions publishes ISO Certification podcast episodes weekly. You can find more episodes here.
Episode 10 Key Content
Hello, everyone, and thanks for listening to the Quality Hub Chatting with ISO experts. I’m your host, Xavier Francis, and I’m here with Suzanne Weber Smatko, manager of consultants Services here at Core Business Solutions. So glad you could be here with us again today, Suzanne.
I’m glad to be here, X.
Today’s show is entitled Maturing Your QMS and we will look at how leadership metrics, employee engagement, and more will help you to mature your QMS. Now, if you’ve listened to the Quality Hub before, you may already be familiar with Suzanne Webber’s Smatko, but in case you haven’t, let’s learn a little bit more about her. Could you share a bit more about what you do and who you are?
Sure. I’ve been in quality for a little over 30 years in quality management systems and at all levels of quality starting as a quality cleric up to a corporate quality director and all of those positions in between. So I have a vast variety of experience in quality.
With all of that experience. Let’s get started with the first question. What do you see as the main challenges in maturing a quality management system after you’ve reached certification?
I think there are probably four or five challenges in my experience. People have when it comes to ensuring a quality management system. I would say the first is a lack of commitment from management. You know, if a company doesn’t have a management system that is supported by management or your leadership teams, then your teams are employees or do not treat quality as a priority.
So you can expect bad quality, which can also result in loss of business. It is evident to customers, suppliers, external registrars, or any interested party for that matter, if the quality is not a company priority.
So it does start from the top down.
Absolutely.
If your employees are feeling that management leadership doesn’t care. Why should I?
Sure. Lead by example. You probably hear that later on. But I would say secondly, overcomplicating a quality management system, you know, we keep it simple. Used to be years ago, and they used to be a lot more complex. But now one of our mottos is to keep it simple. You don’t have to document everything and you must be able to demonstrate that you have competent people doing jobs that meet or exceed the outcome of your products or services.
So it’s all about the demonstration and you can very easily overcomplicate it by over-documenting. I’m not saying that not having standard operating procedures or all of your processes documented isn’t a good thing. It’s great for sustainability. However, a lot of people like to overcomplicate things because they want to document everything right upfront and you certainly don’t need that to be registered.
Right, and you also need to do what you say you’re going to do. So if you document it, technically it could be auditable. And if you’re not doing it, that could be a finding in future surveillance audits. And recertification audits. So if you do want to find the things that matter and continue to add to those things.
And keeping it simple.
Well, you know, especially for small businesses, you have resource constraints, right? I mean, you don’t have limited resources to work on things. So it allows you when you simplify your quality management system, it allows you to document the things that give you the biggest bang for your buck. It allows you to focus your resources so that you can make data-driven decisions and positively impact your bottom line.
Makes sense. Makes sense. Anything else?
Yeah, I would say the third thing that comes to my mind is a lack of training or engagement by them, you know, if you don’t engage and train employees on your policy, the objectives of your management system, what you’re going to measure, they don’t understand how they contribute. Employees contribute every day to the success of the company by doing what they do every day following work instructions, and reporting issues.
And those are the types of things that we’ll get into later on about why you document certain things.
Okay. So getting that buy-in. Again, top down. This is important to us in explaining. That’s why it’s important to us.
Yeah. Yeah, I would say the next thing that comes to my mind is resource constraints, especially in small businesses. You know, we struggle with the resources because they wear so many hats. Dedicating one employee to own an entire management system is not how it’s supposed to work, but engaging everyone to own a portion of that.
So, for example, ownership of a process and those owners handling audits responsible for looking at the data in their respective areas. Ownership kind of gives ownership, which also falls in line after that is engagement. So you’re engaging people and that’s a good segway into the last challenge of maturing your quality management system. Is the change in culture getting everyone to engage and understand the value in the quality management system often results in better performance overall?
For example, building your work instructions rather than, you know, having a manufacturing engineer write all of your work instructions and provide it to unskilled labor, which many of us have on the shop floors. And, as operators doing the work, engaging an employee or operator to help write in the instructions ties them in and gets some very engaged.
Well, and I’m sure you know they’re the ones that have the best handle.
Yeah.
I mean, Joe knows if that machine is persnickety in a certain way because Joe’s worked with that machine for 20 years. So you go and say, Hey, here’s your instructions. I mean, shows kind of look at you might laugh at your like…
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Nobody asked me about this. So you’re almost by not doing it. You’re almost putting a wedge in between leadership and your common worker on the shop floor. So if you don’t have that engagement initially, it could be worse than if you didn’t do anything at all.
Right. And most importantly, it allows that employee to be engaged in actually writing the work instructions because they know how to do it the right way or they know, the ins and outs of, like you said, the equipment or even just the process.
You know, let’s go back to what you were talking about with resource constraints, too. You know, the phrase is many hands make light work. And I know in my experience over my life, I’m learning that all the time. It’s like I think I’ve learned it. And then I’m like, No, I’m trying to do it all myself. When I delegate a little bit or ask for a little bit of help or talk to the person that does the job, you know, instead of me trying to, you know, to reinvent the wheel that’s already been used for 20 years.
Yeah. And I think that with, with resource constraints you were saying earlier, as you’re focused on keeping it simple, getting everybody to partake in it, you’re probably going to get throughput to get those done and continue on more than if you try to bite everything at once.
It becomes a culture then.
So those are the five main challenges you see for the maturity of QMS.
How can a quality management system be enhanced to ensure ongoing compliance and its effectiveness?
You know, it’s all about continuously improving to protect your bottom line along with your quality product or service and your customer satisfaction. You know, you identify ways to measure how well your processes are doing metrics. This allows you to make data-driven decisions on how you want to focus your time and resources. Again, you can’t boil the ocean and you want to focus on the things that are going to impact your bottom line positively.
You continue to identify and document continuous improvement initiatives. You identify and mitigate any risks proactively, not reactively. That’s the mistake that a lot of businesses make, is they’re not addressing risks until something happens and then it’s too late. So the standard is driven around risk-based thinking and really should be proactively looking at things rather than reactively.
Well. Also, if you’re looking at it proactively, you get to choose before something may happen.
Absolutely.
I mean, you’re looking at, you know, this is a potential problem. I know here Core that our leadership has us looking into some things and it’s across the board at different departments, and it’s helping us get a head start on things that might affect our business down the road. So that’s a risk. But we’re turning it into a potential opportunity if we’re paying attention to it before other people may.
Yeah, and that’s the intent. I mean, when we take our customers through certification projects, for example, you know, we have to go through a risk analysis and improvement plan. There are two that come to mind that I like to use as examples for succession planning. Small businesses, again, are constrained on resources, but if you don’t identify those key roles – if something happens to somebody who’s in a key role, you have a big gap and it impacts the business.
It impacts the customer. So write down what those key roles are and have those key roles identify what they do on a day to day so that you don’t have those gaps when somebody is out.
And then have a plan of how we’re going to help make sure. Cross-training helps a lot.
Yes.
Have backup plans in place. You know, the other big one X is cybersecurity. Right. You know, a lot of people don’t take that seriously. But in reality, if you don’t proactively mitigate those risks and put some actions in place, well, you know, it can cost your company millions, if not more. Or shut you down.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that’s something you can’t mess around with as well. I mean, that’s one of the things that we do here at CORE. We talk about that. We work with people who work with 27001, which is the ISO standard to handle cybersecurity information security more than just what’s digital. Sure. And those are things you just have to pay attention to.
But if again, we’re being intentional or looking at it before it becomes a problem.
Be proactive. Yep. I would say that the other items that come to mind to ensure that you’re, you’re being compliant in your quality management system is being effective is you know, it’s a requirement. You have to conduct your management reviews at a frequency that you define. Get your team together as a team to discuss the agenda item so that you are all strategically aligned.
That is the intent there. It’s not just a document, a management review. Many companies work in silos. This is meant for your leadership team to get together to make sure you’re all strategically walking in the same direction.
Absolutely. And outputs from that meeting should be the inputs to your next meeting.
Yes.
So it’s not just, hey, let’s get together. How are things going? Great.
Yeah. There’s a specific agenda item that you go down and it makes you talk about your QMS foundational documentation. It makes you talk about your infrastructure. It makes you talk about resources, it makes you talk about all of, the things that you are required to discuss in a management review. If you sit down and look at the agenda, it’s evident to you that you’re making sure that everyone’s on the same page.
Right? Right.
You know, probably a lot of the things that you’re that we talked about in the first four or five things you said, it can be the biggest challenge are probably some of the things you can be talking about.