Using Business Intelligence to Improve Business Operations and Total Quality Management
Companies are only as good as the people at the top. If corporate leaders aren’t on the same page when it comes to overseeing and directing the company’s operations, productivity, and product quality, the company’s performance is bound to suffer as a result. Different departments may not be working towards the same goals, which makes achieving total quality management all the more difficult.
Unifying leadership will streamline the company’s efforts to achieve success in the marketplace, which in turn will empower departments to work in tandem to achieve your business goals. Breaking down these team silos and creating unified vision will help your company satisfy the needs of the consumers and improve product quality and performance.
It All Starts at the Top
Success doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Corporate leaders need to chart a specific course for their operations if they hope to find success in the marketplace. If employees and departments are working towards different goals, the company will struggle to implement a successful business strategy. Some departments may even step on each other’s toes as they focus their efforts in different directions.
Employees look to their managers and department heads for guidance and direction. If leaders lack a common sense of purpose, their employees won’t be able to put their time to good use. Some employees may focus on tasks that fail to move the company in the right direction, while others may overlook certain factors that can impede the company’s performance.
How Corporate Leadership Impacts Quality Management
Total quality management is about meeting the needs of the customer and ensuring brand and regulatory compliance. Supply quality managers can’t do their job if they don’t have the support and direction of corporate leaders. Quality Managers (QMs) depend on corporate leadership when it comes to meeting the needs of consumers and making sure the company’s products are the best they can be. If quality managers are unclear in terms of what “quality” means to the company, they won’t be able to ensure the company’s products or services are meeting a certain standard.
Corporate leaders need to have a firm understanding of the needs and expectations of their customers and the inner workings of the company’s operations if they want to create a successful business strategy. But establishing these goals can be difficult if leaders lack access to information about their past and current operations. This is where business intelligence comes into play. Business intelligence tools audit every aspect of the company’s operations, including historical, current, and predictive performance.
With the right business analytics tools, corporate leaders and managers can quickly create an overview of their operations, so they can identify which aspects of the company are successful and which ones need improvement. Having access to this data will help corporate leaders create and implement a successful business strategy.
As an example, let’s look at how to use data in your supplier quality management (SQM) programs. First, you need to ensure you have a process that allows you to gather the right quality and quantity of data. In our modern economy, this most certainly means investing in tech that helps collect and analyze data in meaningful ways. With this type of business intelligence tool, you increase visibility into your processes, which means you can proactively drive improvement. In the case of SQM, you and your managers will be able to identify successes and failures with the company’s suppliers and products. You can quickly identify and correct issues, then improve your process. Alternatively, you can identify what’s working and push those solutions.
Unifying corporate leadership can be a challenge without business intelligence. Choosing and implementing a successful business strategy means having access to the right statistical data and product performance information. If you’re ready to learn more about a tech-driven business intelligence tool that can help you spot trends and improve results, visit RizePoint.com.
Improve Your Brand’s Reputation by Setting the Right Corporate Values
Corporate culture affects every aspect of your business. If you focus on improving this culture, your employees will reward you by putting passion into their work, limiting employee turnover, and increasing their productivity. You can use this corporate culture to improve quality management outcomes, helping you deliver the best products and services to your customers. This will lead to better sales, great PR, and a corporate culture you can be proud of.
How Corporate Culture Informs Your Entire Business
Regardless of what your company wants to achieve, it all starts with the right corporate culture. The culture behind your business will affect just about every decision you make, from workplace conditions to social media and the suppliers you choose to work with. Remember that old saying, “the fish rots at the head”? The same is true of any company. CEOs and managers need to lead by example, showing employees how decisions are made first-hand.
Your employees will internalize this behavior and use it to inform their own decisions at the office, including how they spend their time and how they interact with customers and clients. That’s why you need to start your employees off on the right foot by showing them what you want your company to look like.
If you start your company off on the wrong foot by encouraging negative behavior, it’s bound to lead to an unhealthy corporate culture that affects every aspect of your business. You might send out the wrong message on social media, lose client bookings, or come under scrutiny for selling poorly made products or hurting the environment. This will lead to bad PR, lower sales, and a toxic corporate culture.
Corporate culture also affects the way you and your team manage your quality processes. Your employees will look to the corporate culture when analyzing your products and services, including quality assurance, quality control, supplier quality management, location management, and more. A strong company culture that values people, quality, and sustainability will empower managers and workers to take action and build stronger processes.
2 Companies Using Their Corporate Culture to Their Advantage
Two companies have recently made waves in the business world for their commitment to corporate social responsibility (CSR). Both Patagonia, the outdoor apparel manufacturer, and Zappos, the online retailer, have invested in a positive workplace culture that’s driving results in more ways than one.
Patagonia is investing in CSR by offering free daycare services at its corporate offices in Venture, California and Reno, Nevada. This helps its employees focus on the task at hand, knowing their children are being taken care of while they’re at the office. This has also led to a wave of positive PR stories for the company, helping them earn a unique competitive edge within their markets. The company can attract top-tier talent with ease, which helps drive the company to success.
Zappos has also transformed its corporate culture in recent years by focusing on ten core values. These values range from delivering exceptional customer service to creating “a little weirdness” in the workplace and building open and honest relationships with communication. Zappos believes that positive PR all starts with positive HR. The company’s human resources team has made these core values an integral part of the hiring and training experience. Employees are reminded of these values almost everywhere they go. This way, everyone is on the same page and working towards the same goals without trying to one-up each other.
How to Make the Most of Your Corporate Culture
Based on these examples of corporate excellence, it’s clear that corporate culture starts at the top. As a business leader, it’s up to you to create and reinforce company culture. To begin, ask your human resources team to establish a list of values and share these with your employees.
Make a special effort with potential new hires to ensure they understand will and commit to company values before joining the team. These values may include adhering to rigorous processes, treating coworkers with respect, caring for the environment, and giving back to the local community and non-profit intuitions.
Risk management professionals cannot help their organizations succeed without a clear strategy to win, delight, and retain customers. Yet, too many companies remain reactive when it comes to mitigating the risks associated with customer-related experiences.
There’s a Problem
We’ve all seen it before: A customer has a negative experience with your brand, let’s say at a hotel, where they are disappointed by a hard mattress and a late check-in.
Unfortunately, in today’s age of social media, a poor customer experience doesn’t stop at the comment box and a quick rant to friends. Instead, a customer’s words can reach beyond their network. With just a few keystrokes, your brand has gone viral for all the wrong reasons.
No one likes to get beat-up on social media, but once the complaint is out there it’s up to your company to do damage control. Every potential misstep that a disgruntled customer can air on the internet has far-reaching implications.
For many industries, especially retail, food service, and hospitality, success is measured by positive ratings on social media.
What if you could avoid the whole scenario in the first place?
Proactive Risk Management
By adopting a proactive approach to providing a consistent, streamlined, and positive customer experience, organizations can limit the number of risks that might impede a positive customer experience.
Minimizing, or even eliminating, such risks helps your brand protect its reputation, revenue, and regulatory fitness.
Industry studies confirm that a successful customer experience program benefits the bottom line.
So why aren’t more organizations placing greater emphasis on eliminating problems before they have a chance to appear?
There are a few reasons:
• Customer experience risk management gets lost in finance, legal, and HR risks. • Business executives don’t understand the extent of customer experience related risks. • Traditional audits don’t focus on customer-facing policies. • Auditing teams are stretched too thin.
Thousands of Hours of Work
Ask any audit professional and they will tell you that they are strapped for time. They spend their time auditing for safety, quality, and local and federal regulations. Auditing customer-facing policies like brand standards can be viewed as a ‘nice to have’ rather than a necessity.
Too often, overshadowed by finance, legal, and HR risks, potential risks related to customer-facing processes just don’t show up in audit forms.
In the hotel example, the mattress firmness would not be part of a typical risk management assessment. Hotel auditors focus on high risks areas like pool, fire, and food safety, and the guest experience becomes a lower priority. As we know, the guest experience is the focus of customer reviews.
In most organizations, there are simply not enough human resources to address nontraditional and non-regulatory risk management.
A Better Way
Automating your audits frees up precious man-hours to do more than just pen and paper regulatory audits.
With the right tools and techniques, auditors can cover customer touch points like mattress firmness in addition to traditional regulations. This gives your brand the opportunity to prevent negative customer experiences by taking a more proactive approach.
When Hard Rock Hotels switched from Excel to Mobile Auditor, the brand compliance evaluation process transformed into a continuous improvement cycle. With the time saved by switching from manual audits to a mobile app, auditors could add an additional layer of evaluation—the mystery shop—to their workflow.
It’s time to arm risk professionals with the tools and technology they need to include the customer experience in traditional quality audits. By investing in the right technology and techniques to focus on managing the circumstances that inhibit good customer experiences, risk-management professionals and programs can move from a position of cost mitigation to a more valuable one of revenue generation.
With RizePoint, getting the right technology and techniques into the hands of your employees is simple. Learn how RizePoint can help you manage your risk by creating a powerful brand experience inside and out when you download this free datasheet.
At RizePoint, we learn from and listen to our customers. The October 2017 release is a great example of exactly that. This release is focused on security, efficiency, and transparency during the evaluation process.
RizePoint’s Mobile Auditor now offers a new enterprise single sign-on capability that improves deployment times and will satisfy your security compliance requirements. This improves access control to our application and helps maintain a cohesive security infrastructure based on your security standards.
In addition, we have changed the way your team will interact with our application when performing multiple evaluations at a single site. We know that the moment a team member arrives onsite that time is valuable and efficiency is key to making or breaking your objectives.
This new feature allows you to perform multiple assessments and evaluations on a single visit without the hassle of changing your forms based on that latest external department request.
As an example, your team can perform brand and signage evaluations at the same time they are performing the annual safety assessment; all while maintaining the necessary signatures, feedback, and corrective action.
Finally, transparency and trust are an essential part of any comprehensive quality program. Mobile Auditor now stores GPS coordinates at the start and during the evaluation allowing everyone to be crystal clear when and where the assessment was performed.
Each of these features was initiated by one of our great clients and we are genuinely excited to get these updates into the hands of your auditors, consultants, and quality leaders.
For more information on these updates, contact your RizePoint Account Executive today.
Safety and quality management is an essential part of operations and critical to a brand’s success regardless of industry. As your organization matures in its approach to corporate compliance, you will discover best practices for your business model. One such practice is making the move from paper and pen to a cloud-based safety and quality management solution.
Paper and Pen vs. Mobile Apps
Traditionally, homegrown systems, excel sheets, stand-alone applications or even manual paper-based systems have been used in SMBs to Fortune 500s to manage quality, prevent risk, and ensure internal and external regulations. There are many inherent problem in a system that relies on fragmented, disconnected tracking and monitoring methodologies to maintain a consistent, well-documented record of regulatory and corporate compliance.
The problems with antiquated paper and pen protocols are many:
Numerous fail points
Human error in data entry
Inability to scale
Inefficient and costly
Failure to coordinate teams in separate locations
Inability to monitor the compliance program as a whole
Less visibility
Less accountability
In organizations that are still utilizing paper and pen, inconsistent policies and procedures can turn an auditor’s day into a continual exercise of hunting and gathering information. This means that companies are utilizing highly educated, skilled human capital to aggregate data without tying the data to corrective action. Imagine what quality management teams and individual contributors could do if they utilized one system—a safety and quality management platform—to track multiple practices in one place.
There would be more time to:
Identify internal and external risks
Escalate compliance concerns appropriately through the organization
Train teams on new federal regulations, industry trends, and risk compliance best practices
Build relationships through the organization to foster a culture of corporate compliance
Influence outcomes of critical business decisions
Choosing the Right Technology
Organizations typically outgrow paper and pen when they reach more than 10 locations. The desire to simplify, streamline, reduce costs, and increase business intelligence typically drives adoption of a safety and quality management platform. Selecting the right software is critical to the success of a quality management program.
Look for the following features in your new technology solution:
The ability to support a wide array of use cases
Strong integration capability with your existing technology system
Scale easily
The ability to view global results in real-time
Visual reporting and dashboards
Off-line inspection capabilities
The ability to support a good safety practice, auditing practice and management practice
Automated corrective action plans and remediation with alerts and notifications
Customizable integration
An end-to-end software solution, like RizePoint, supports safety and quality management teams to drive real business value by ensuring a positive brand experience. To learn more visit https://9019c3a60e.nxcli.io/products/.
