Here are 9 strategies that can help you lower your cost of poor quality
1. Clear Product and Process Traceability
One way to cut down your costs of poor quality is to improve the visibility into your product quality, as well as the processes involved in manufacturing and distributing your product. Without good traceability in products and processes, organizations are more susceptible to product delays, defects, and recalls, and process breaches. Additionally, ensuring clear product and process traceability helps you shorten the time to track down root causes and identify the stage at which the defect was caused.
2. Closed-Loop Nonconformance and Corrective Action Program
Remediating problems is one of the key aspects to curb costs of nonconformance arising from production deviations, errors in specifications, quality incidents, or customer complaints.
3. Systematic Preventive Maintenance Procedures
Following diligent preventive maintenance procedures can help you assess potential losses, estimate the frequency of failure and work towards minimizing it, with an optimal maintenance policy.
4. Periodic Internal Quality Audit
Internal quality audit is important for organizations to keep a tab on non-conformities, if any, in products or processes. This helps you notice any loopholes in or deviations from quality requirements which can be mitigated from source at the earliest. When quality issues go unnoticed, your organization’s COPQ can increase, and in the long run it can snowball into a disaster, affecting your bottom line.
5. Seamless Change Management Process
While an organization’s ability to handle change has been often criticized, successful change management depends on strong leadership and clear policies. With changes, come many risks and uncertainties. A well-defined and streamlined process will ensure that these changes are implemented successfully with minimal disruption and risk.
6. Aggregated Customer Complaints and Timely Return Management
When it comes to customers, their satisfaction of your product is what will keep your organization growing and your bottom line rising. Ensuring that they are happy is often a tricky business. To stay on top of things, it is essential for you to keep track of all customer complaints, analyze them, and provide prompt remedial responses
7. Streamlined Supplier Quality Program
Suppliers can generally affect your CoPQ by producing defective material and/or finished products. Any loopholes in a supplier’s process would have a direct effect on your organization’s brand and revenue.
8. Effective Training For Employees and Suppliers
Maintaining and nurturing the knowledge-base of employees and suppliers is one of the crucial elements of taking a step toward reducing your CoPQ. All personnel need to be up to speed with policies, SOPs, regulations, and other relevant quality metrics, so that violations are kept at bay. By providing periodic training sessions, tests, and awareness programs for your employees and suppliers, you can ensure all of the components of your business ecosystem are on the same page, moving toward achieving a unified objective.
9. Electronic Records and Documentation Management
To make sure that your employees and suppliers are up-to-date with relevant policies, contracts, SOWs, SOPs, guidelines, regulations, and other such documents, you need to be able to store them in a centralized location with applicable access rights.
