QSA Director & Lead Quality Consultant Charlotte Mahoney recently joined Matthew McSharry on the Inside the Chain podcast to talk about ISO 9001, quality culture, supplier management, auditing and the growing role of AI in quality.
Quality management should do far more than help an organisation pass an audit or maintain its ISO 9001 certification.
A well-designed Quality Management System should support the way a business actually operates. It should give people clarity about responsibilities, help create consistency, make it easier to identify and manage risk, and provide useful information that supports better decisions.
But there can be quite a gap between having a certified management system and having one that genuinely works for the business.
That was the starting point for a wide-ranging conversation when QSA Director & Lead Quality Consultant Charlotte Mahoney joined Matthew McSharry for an episode of the Inside the Chain podcast.
Watch the conversation
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You can also find the episode on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Moving beyond compliance
One of the themes running throughout the conversation is something we talk about regularly at QSA:
Compliance is important, but it isn’t the whole value of a good management system.
An organisation can have procedures, records and certificates in place and still experience inconsistent ways of working, unclear responsibilities, recurring problems or an endless cycle of firefighting.
The real test of a QMS isn’t simply whether the right documentation can be produced for an auditor. It’s whether the system helps people do their jobs well every day.
Charlotte and Matthew discuss what that looks like in practice, including the importance of clearly defined responsibilities and making sure the people carrying quality responsibilities have the right training, support and authority.
Because when quality becomes something that is simply added to somebody’s existing job, without the time, knowledge or authority to manage it properly, even a technically compliant system can struggle to deliver what the organisation needs from it.
Quality culture, not just audit culture
Internal audits are another important part of the conversation.
Done well, an audit is an opportunity to understand what’s happening within the organisation, identify where things aren’t working as intended and find opportunities to improve.
Done purely to satisfy a requirement, much of that value can be lost.
That means being prepared to ask useful questions and, importantly, being honest about the answers.
The same applies when reviewing the context of the organisation and assessing risk. These shouldn’t simply be exercises completed because a clause in a standard says they are required. They should help the organisation understand what could affect its ability to deliver consistently and where attention may be needed.
It is that shift from
“What do we need to show?”
to
“What do we need to know?”
that can turn a management system into something genuinely useful.
Looking beyond your own organisation
Quality doesn’t stop at the front door.
Supplier performance can have a significant impact on an organisation’s ability to deliver consistently, which makes supplier evaluation another important part of an effective management system.
During the episode, Charlotte discusses the Quality, Cost and Delivery (QCD) framework as one practical way of looking at supplier performance.
Rather than supplier approval becoming a one-off administrative exercise, using meaningful measures can give an organisation greater visibility of how its supply chain is actually performing and help identify issues before they become bigger problems.
And, inevitably, we talked about AI…
It probably isn’t possible to have a conversation about the future of business systems at the moment without AI entering the room somewhere.
Quality management is no exception.
Charlotte and Matthew explore some of the ways AI can support quality professionals, including its potential role in auditing and management-system reviews.
Used appropriately, AI can help interrogate information, identify patterns and support the review process. But it doesn’t remove the need for knowledge, experience or human judgement.
Understanding the organisation, recognising context, asking the right questions and deciding what the information actually means remain very human responsibilities.
For us, that’s an important distinction. Technology can make good quality management more effective, but it doesn’t replace the thinking behind it.
Is your Quality Management System working for your business?
If some of the issues Charlotte and Matthew discuss sound familiar, you don’t necessarily need a new management system.
Often, the opportunity is to take a fresh look at the system you already have: how well it reflects the way the organisation operates, whether responsibilities are clear, where inconsistencies have developed and whether the information being collected is actually helping you improve.
At QSA, we help organisations understand where their quality management systems are today and develop practical improvements that work for their people, their operations and their accreditation or certification requirements.
If you’d like an initial conversation about your own Quality Management System, get in touch with Charlotte and the QSA team.
About Inside the Chain
Inside the Chain is hosted by Matthew McSharry, founder of insight4business and a Lean Six Sigma practitioner with more than 20 years’ experience across manufacturing, FMCG and engineering.
The podcast brings together people working across operations, manufacturing, procurement and supply chain to have practical conversations about the realities of improving business performance, from transformation and operational challenges to the people, processes and systems behind them.
You can find out more about Inside the Chain and insight4business here, or connect with Matthew McSharry on LinkedIn.