Do companies need Quality Department ?

When we hear the word “Business Process”, the associated department that comes into picture is nothing other than Quality. But there is always a Question that lies unanswered. When business processes are for the Business, what is that Quality supposes to do with Business Processes? Is Quality Owning these processes? What is the Value addition that Quality is giving to these processes? When most of the Quality Guys are from General Business Background, who does not have in depth knowledge of any of the Businesses, what is the support that Quality can give to the Business Processes? These are some of the interesting Questions that we are trying to look into.

Quality in every organization has only one objective - It is to ensure customer satisfaction. There are different approaches that companies adopt to achieve this objective. Some call it by the name Business Excellence, Some by the name Process Improvement, and for somebody else it is Business Process Management. Ultimately, it is all linked to one objective – Meet & exceed the expectations of your customers, be it Internal or External Customers.

How Quality does help in achieve customer satisfaction? The common perceptions that Business Heads/Business Units carry is that ‘ We are the masters of our business, we know what is good and what is bad for our business, we are doing this business for the last couple of decades, we know what our customers require. What is the value that an External Department like Quality can add to our Business who does not know anything about our businesses?’ Before we look into these, let us put forward some Questions to our business Heads

• Do you spend Quality Time to review of your process on a regular basis
• Do you check the Health of your process
• Have you defined performance indicators for your process
• Have you reengineered your process based on the changing customer
expectations
• Is your process LEAN
• Is your process Benchmarked

As business heads, if you are able to answer a YES to these Questions, then surely Quality has got no role to play in the Organization. But research studies have shown that not even 1 % of the Business Heads could give a YES to these Questions. This brings us to the importance of Quality.

Let us make our understanding a little clearer from an Example. If we take the case of a Recruitment Process, there would be some many steps involved in the recruitment process, so many people involve & so many customers involved. How do you ensure the Quality of your Recruitment Process? For companies who are doing the recruitments in huge volumes, it is sure that you will not have time to look into the efficiency of your process. Quality can add value by making your process LEAN by removing all the Non Adding Value in your Process, Keep an Constant track on the Performance Indicators of your Process , Failure Mode Analysis for your Process, Effects of special causes etc thereby helping you to do your work in a better way.

After all Quality is not an independent department. Quality is there to help other departments in doing their work in a better way, Quality is there to help you in your day to day operations, and it is there to join hands with you to improve the customer satisfaction. Quality is Indispensible.