Many organisations these days believe a management system is to obtain certification to an international standard. Actually, if you really want to get the benefit of a management system, the certification level is a very low level to try and achieve.
Let's talk about how we can get the real benefit from a management system that will drive improvement inside your business and way beyond the requirements of certification to a standard.
Business Risks
The first and most important part to understand the real benefit of your management system, is to find out where the risks are within your business.
To find out the real risks in your business, you have to communicate with the people undertaking these processes. The guys right at the front, on the construction, inside the production lines, then you can really understand what the risks are that they are exposed to.
I'm not talking about risk to health, or risk to safety, I'm talking about the risk to your business in general. With risk comes cost, and that's the main thing that businesses want to drive down in their organisation through a proper management system that works for them.
Hidden Benefits of a Management System
Identifying what are the errors that happen in our business?
Do we have too many projects that run on too long?
Do we have products that we don't deliver on time?
Or do we have suppliers in our supply chain that send us the wrong parts or faulty parts?
That means that we have to invest time and energy to fix these problems outside on normal operations.
Effective Management Systems
If our management system is effective, it will drive improvements in these errors so that we can recognize them and drive improvements back down through our supply chain, down into our production lines and really grasp what it is our management system is doing.
Suddenly, we've stepped into a world of cost and finances. But actually, if we want to drive engagement and get support from the leadership in our organisation, sometimes we have to talk about finance, we have to talk about the cost. And based on that cost, we can try and reduce that error to minimize that cost and drive that improvement going forward.
The true cost of error is individual in each organisation, from the time that we spend to put something right, to the products that we have to buy to replace the faulty ones. If we calculate our true error based on this financial value, it will allow us to drive and understand the cost of pure quality and that will help us drive improvements forward.
Takeaways
Focus on your higher risks
Identify errors
Drive improvement
Get everyone Involved
Measure