12/1/2017 7 Steps to be IMPACTFUL as a Quality Manager - Food Safety Experts

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7 Steps to be IMPACTFUL as a Quality Manager

door Kitty Appels & Rob Kooijmans in Management  28

Introduction
Do you have a feeling you are managing quality for your organization just for compliance
reasons, just to have a certificate on the wall? This happens in many organizations. What
people fail to see is that real, impactful
quality management has a strong,
positive e ect on the company and on
its financial results! But how do you
create that level of impact in your
company as a quality manager? Too
o en you are bogged down by the day
to day issues you are facing with
customer complaints, blocked stock, external audits and just managing the complexity of
all the items in your quality and food safety management system.
In this article we will share seven important steps with you to step away from reactive
quality management to becoming an impactful quality manager who delivers amazing
results to the company. The steps in themselves will sound straightforward and simple, but
it takes a lot of determination and focus to successfully deliver each step.

Ensure you have a good team

Every success is defined by the team, hence this is the place to make a start. In many
companies, the quality department historically has been the place to “park” employees
that did not fully perform in other departments. While this approach could be taken in the
1980’s and 1990’s, this is nowadays a dangerous route to take! In most countries around
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the globe there have been significant changes to legislation in relation to food
manufacturing. Next to this GFSI standards like BRC, IFS, FSSC 22000 and IQF have been
established since. Over the years the GFSI standards have been a major driving force in the
elevation of quality and food safety management in terms of thoroughness and complexity.
In other word
s: quality management in the food
manufacturing industry has become a true discipline.

For this reason it is important to ensure you

have a capable and strong enough team. A good
way to assess this is to get insight in the
strengths and weaknesses of your team in
terms of knowledge and skills to work with
other people (influence them). Next to this it is also good to have a good view of the overall
workload of your team as the level of the standards has risen sharply over the last 5-10
years, whereas most of the time the number of people in your team hasn’t. Hence you
might be facing a work-overload situation that needs to be address first.

Before you continue to the execution phases of your plans (see later on) you must ensure to
take action if there are true non-performers in your team. It is OK to recognize that not
everybody is at the desired level yet – you can get them there over the coming years. As
long as you create the focus and continue to invest in people’s skills and competencies you
will  be able to build a strong and high performing team.

Get insight with CONQ

Once you know the strengths and weaknesses of your team it is time to start doing the
same for the quality performance of your organization. The best way to do this is to get
good insight in your cost of non-quality (CONQ). Now I hear you ask: “ Why is cost of non-
quality so important?” The biggest reason why CONQ is so important is that it is expressed
in money – and money is the universal language all managers and company owners
understand. If you need to connive you manager to invest in your team and to invest in
quality in general , you need to be able to substantiate the benefits. And this is always done
in money!

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Most quality systems deliver only a partial insight of the total CONQ a company is facing. By
working with the production and finance department and
setting up a systematic process where you use typical standard
costs for e.g. complaints, not right first time product, returned
goods, degrade product, scrapped product etc., you will be able
to set-up a system to easily (and quite accurately) track your
company’s CONQ performance. Most of the time you can even
use the same approach to create a historical overview of the
past three years for the CONQ your company has been facing.

The numbers might be higher than you expect, but this is good news! It means there is a lot
of room for improvement. Next to this there is another benefit of CONQ: most of the
components have a direct impact on the company profit as almost every item in CONQ is
and additional costs that can be avoided and if it is structurally avoided you will have a
structural increase of the company’s profit. Now you have the attention of your senior
management and company owner.

Create awareness / sense of urgency

Once you know you have a good team or at least are building towards it and you have good
insight in your cost of non-quality it is time to ensure you grab the full attention of your
senior management and/or company owner. The work you have done in relation to your
team (e.g. workload analysis) and in getting good (historical) insight in your CONQ are two
important factors of a presentation you want to prepare for your senior management.

In the presentation you want to show that quality and food safety and nowadays really
crucial factors for any successful company. On the one hand you can do this by showing the
impact of not managing quality and food safety correctly by taking examples of other
companies (preferably from your type of industry) who have faced severe issues in the
market because of quality problems. Next to this you also want to make clear that the
regulatory landscape and certification requirements are continuously changing and ever
increasing the demands on your company.

There is one more items you should consider to bring into your presentation: a comparison
between the impact of a safety related fatality in your company and a food safety related
fatality of a consumer of your products. As you will find out (just by looking at the

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newspapers) a food safety related fatality can be detrimental for company and in some
cases even cause bankruptcy. This hardly ever happens in the case of a safety related
fatality, which is of course a tragedy, but it will not threaten the continuity of a company.

If you want to have a good example of this type of presentation go to our website – we have
posted an example presentation there, which you can even download for free.

Together, de ne a multi-year plan

Once you get your senior management and company owner agree that quality and food
safety are a priority to really work on it is time for you to define a multi-year plan. In
defining your plan there are two things really important: first of all of course the content of
your plan – you want to pay attention to the right things in the right order. But be aware do
not jump immediately into the content all by yourself (or only with a few direct reports)! A
good plan is only a good plan if you have enough believers in your plan, even more the plan
should never be YOUR plan it must be a plan which is owned by a much larger group of
people. You can start to make a first dra yourself or with a small team, so at least you
know where you would like to take quality and food safety towards in the coming years.
But leave it a that – a dra ! This brings us to the second and most important part of your
multi-year plan: make it together with the relevant people. There are two key stakeholder
groups that you need to work with: your senior management and your team.

First of all you want to

float your ideas to your
senior management and
company owner to
ensure they are aligned
with you and are able to
give their input up front.
This is best done by
setting up one-on-one
meetings with each of them and prepare the agenda so they know you want to talk about
your multi-year improvement plans. Instead of explaining the dra plan to them, let them
do the talking – you want to understand what aspects are important for them. Only explain
your dra at the end of the discussion. Quite o en you will find the general direction will be

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the same, but by playing it this way you might get additional insights and of course more
buy-in because the senior manager has been able to express his/her ideas.

Now it is time to work with your team – and here you take exactly the same approach: you
want to build you multi-year plan together with your team. You can do this be taking them
on the same route you have gone so far: show them the outcomes of the assessment of
your department, the results of the cost of non-quality analysis, the presentation you have
held for your senior management and then facilitate a team discussion towards a multi-
year plan. Be aware not to present your plan – build it from scratch with your team. This
way your team will really own it – yes the wording might be slightly di erent and some of
the priorities might also be di erent. It does not matter – you only want to push your
thoughts on topics or priorities that REALLY matter. By doing it this way you will generate
tremendous ownership in your team of your (the group’s) plan. The last thing you want to
be facing is a team who see the plan as the boss’ idea.

Create focussed improvement (CAPA)

One of the biggest mistakes quality managers make is not to set priorities in all the
improvement actions they feel that need to take place. The majority of food producing
companies are working against one or more GFSI certification schemes. In the
requirements for these certification schemes usually there is a list of situations where
performing a root cause analysis and setting up corrective and preventive measures is
mandatory (e.g. food safety related complains,
CCP breaches, external audit findings, etc.). In
quite a few quality management systems this
has been translated to: “ we will perform ad
root cause analysis followed by corrective and
preventive actions for every issue we
encounter”. This is not manageable, takes a lot
of time and leads to shallow improvements and
usually little or no results.

Here’s what you really want to do: yes – you

must perform a root cause analysis on those topics that are mandatory in relation to your
certification scheme. There might be even some areas in addition to this that are
mandatory because of legislation in your country. But for the rest, you want to take a

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di erent approach! Make a historical overview of the last (two) year(s) of all the issues you
have been facing (not first time right product, blocked products, complaints, issues and
recalls) and from this create a Pareto chart. All of this information will already be available
as part of the CONQ analysis. Once you have the Pareto chart you can see what topic gives
you the biggest monetary loss – this is the area you want to place your improvement e orts
on.

The strong point of taking this approach is that you focus all your e ort on creating the
maximum result. And when results get in people (including senior management) will see
that your plan is working! This is a very powerful fly-wheel that will only make you and
others drive for more.

Issue management
Despite all the good things you are doing as part of your quality management approach
and the multi-year plan you still might face issues. Issues like repeating complaints, more
severe complaints (e.g. food safety related) or complaints with your biggest customers. In
addition (and not contradiction) to the previous section you must place focus on these as
well. You really want to pro-actively manage issues when they occur, this way you have the
highest likelihood to keep costs low and customers and equally important your internal
stakeholders happy.

If you fail to manage issues correctly it will only

impede the execution of your multi-year plan
and give reasons for senior management to
start doubting your plans or even your
capabilities. So next to focussing on one big
topic to really improve you MUST manage all
issues at hand with priority. Make sure you plan
for this. Leave at least 1 hour per day available
for yourself to manage severe issues. Of course this is too little a time reservation when an
issue really occurs, but it does two things: the first hour you have available any way so you
don’t lose out on other things and if there is no issue you can use that hour to work on the
big improvement (so you will move forward faster than planned if there are not a lot of
issues). Don’t spend the hour on reading emails or sitting in meetings etc.!

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When managing issues there is one more important thing – defining appropriate actions
and following up on all actions. You might easily lose your overview if there are several
issues at hand at the same time. Hence good action tracking is important. Have a look at
our blog on Inspection Rounds as it contains a link to a powerful action tracking tool in
Excel, which is free for you to download.

Celebrate all successes

Next to the fly-wheel factor we described in the section on defining your multi-year plan
together, there is a second equally powerful fly wheel: celebrating your success. Quite o en
managers have a tendency only to review performance and celebrate the success once a
year. This is way too infrequent! You really want to take the opportunity and celebrate
every success, no matter how small it is.

Why? Celebrating success is not about bragging

– it is about showing recognition to those
people involved in creating the success.
Celebration does not necessarily mean you are
going to eat cake / give (financial) incentives to
people. Of course you should do this from time
to time (certainly when you have big successes).
You also want to share the smaller successes
and give recognition to the people who created
these successes. You can even link this to a nice
competition e.g. “Employee of the Month” or “ Improvement Guru of the Month” and give a
perk like  the front parking spot for the coming month. This way you can easily create
recognition for everybody as you will not only communicate the winner be all contestants
achievements.
If celebrating success is not (yet) part of your company’s culture, make a start as it is not
only a fly wheel, but also a crucial enabler of the overall success of your approach. It is the
fuel your multi-year plan will work on, because 90% of any success is defined by the
motivation and ownership of the people who have to deliver it!

Do you want to take the rst step?

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