However, ensuring consistently high levels of quality across the entire product cycle requires systems and solutions that address quality issues across the board. The capacity to identify, verify and revise nascent quality issues must be quick, and extend to all corners of the enterprise. Putting this into practice would require a closed-loop, cloud-based, enterprise quality management solution that is not only limited to product development but can also work to address quality issues arising across the entire supply chain and downstream applications.
Looking Beyond Product Development
It is all too common for manufacturers to approach quality control with a narrow vision, one that often only looks at the product development process. At first glance, this might not seem problematic, but when examined in light of the rule of ten (which states that the cost of a problem becomes exponentially higher as it is discovered at a later stage in the manufacturing process ), it assumes much higher importance.
However, if manufacturers were to temporarily look beyond this and seek to implement a quality system that would facilitate the identification of quality issues (Customer Complaints/Non-Conformances) at an early phase, implement corrective and preventive actions, perform Audits and further integrate the right quality information between systems, then various technical and economic benefits can be achieved at an earlier phase, which in turn will compound profits across the entire product value chain.
Quality is no longer synonymous with product integrity alone: instead, it is a company’s on-going commitment to excellence across all the departments, individuals and processes involved in developing the product (including sustainability, regulatory requirements, quality enforcement, cost reduction and efficiency, prevention of failures, standard reporting, lessons learned and know-how transfer, etc.). Traditionally, companies have managed quality internally, relying on in-house teams that mostly use static quality documents or isolated applications for quality management tracking. However, businesses have begun to feel the need for something more robust to manage their ever-expanding and increasingly complex business requirements. This shift has given way to smarter modes of managing quality, in the form of EQM.
Assessing Enterprise Quality Management Systems and beyond.
Any chain is only as strong as its weakest link. This analogy applies equally well to the modern supply chain, and there is no better way to take stock of existing quality control management systems than to take a long, hard look at the potential areas of failure. Any organization in the manufacturing business must constantly be on the lookout for two things: risk and quality. How do the existing quality processes mitigate risk? How effective are existing systems when it comes to responding to a quality-related crisis? These are some of the first questions that organizations need to ask themselves.
Beyond initial impressions, it would do well to look at the collaborative aspects of the existing system. Understanding the extent of visibility into all aspects of quality, evaluating approaches for continuous improvement, and knowing how quality integrates with the overarching business process would reveal the strengths and weaknesses of the existing manufacturing setup.
Oracle's Quality Management Cloud provides a unified platform for enabling quality visibility, collaboration, and execution.
The key focus of Oracle Quality Management is to provide quality teams with enterprise level quality control, guide users with quality issue resolutions, implement corrective and Preventive actions, facilitate inspections at critical points throughout Supply chain execution and a closed-loop quality management system.
