Making Quality a Habit

Quality comes when u develop it as a habit. Every organization these days tries to find ways in which to grow their business. These organizations have a common theme in place which makes them profitable and noteworthy in the market. This can be done can having proper business processes in place, aligning your scope and setting up appropriate objectives which can be measured and sustained in the long run. The other important aspect is the maintaining the quality of services over the period of time. For such an organization to run effectively and productively you will require a certain number of professionals from quality leads to business associates. This ratio can vary depending upon the business process, its complexity, size of its operations, and managing it in the long run. This is also applicable to the providers as well in the market who deliver services at a certain amount cost. The providers & organizations can use the below mentioned points to be successful and effective in their business.

1. Baseline measures and metrics – To define is to achieve. Before you start something new, it’s necessary to define what you need to achieve at the end of it. Organizations need a have proper set of objectives & benchmarks before you initiate a business process. Often service providers find it difficult to identify these because of the lack of historical or process data from clients end. It’s always better to define a set of baseline metrics before the start of an engagement. It enables you to better handle the targets, incentives and service credits associated to it. Anything that can be measured can be improved.
2. Training and Certifications – Training’s are an important part of the culture of the organization. It’s like an investment that you do on your executives. Training allows them to imbibe the culture of the organization and also help them better understand the business process. You may not attain quick gains from this, but it would yield benefits to the company in the long run. Similarly certifications can be done depending upon the experience and domain of the executives.
3. Sustainability – This is an important aspect when it comes to long term solutions or engagements. Often it happens that more focus is given during the implementation stage but very little on how to sustain it. For any system to work, the main focus should be on how you can sustain your business process. This can be achieved by constantly monitoring, tracking and improving your services subsequently. Provide solutions which can be sustained over a long period of time.
4. Knowledge & Resource Management – This are two backbones of any organization. One is the knowledge that you possess of your market domain and how you utilize those in improving your business. Resources are the ones through which you can achieve those. Thus attrition can play major role in decreasing your bench strength. This can be dealt with by having quality management systems such as ISO 9001 which can useful. Once you have a rigorous set of processes which are ISO 9001 certified the over time it can be game changer for your business growth. While outsourcing, examine the knowledge management processes of your potential service provider.
5. Continuous Improvements Programs – Keep improving as you move ahead, that should the company motto when it comes to growth. Every client needs new improvements in their business but they always come at a price. This usually happens when outsourcing. Implement a share based model when the client and the provider invest in improving the business process. This can benefit both the parties and they have equal partnership in driving it ahead. This keeps the client happy and also the service provider is confident of building a long term relationship with the client.
6. Ideas and Best Practices – The process of capturing ideas and industrializing them across the organization. Organizations often have their best practices in place to deliver better results to clients. ISO 9001 can help businesses and organizations throughout the world to develop a best-in-class Quality Management System (QMS). Capturing new ideas can be also be implemented through a formal process and a structured reward and recognition program.
7. Feedback & Qualitative analysis – Clients often have a lot to say about their counter parts or service providers. There should be proper set of attributes through the feedback data should captured, tracked and presented in a dashboard form. Service providers should also have a feedback process in place where you capture data based on different parameters. Similarly should be followed by organizations for their own employees and consequently have some incentive based program which will help build the executives morale.

About Author:

Mihir Sakhle is consultant and part of Systems Plus Pvt. Ltd. He is a part of consulting team that delivers Sourcing and Vendor Managementg Office projects. He can be contacted at: mihir.s@spluspl.com