As often happens, not only for Quality Management, the analysis of investment projects involving purchases of IT products (software and hardware), services from suppliers, and changes in internal processes can become lengthy and laborious for several reasons:
- Competition with other internal projects and budget allocation to other objectives.
- The organizational weight and personal influence that Managers assert in discussions regarding "their" projects.
- The lack of clear visibility into the actual returns on the investments under discussion.
At least this last aspect will increasingly become easier for those who decide to bring investment topics in Quality Management to the attention of their Management.
Investing in quality management is, in fact, a practically inexhaustible source of economic and financial benefits for companies that decide to do so, especially when partnering with market leaders like Blulink and their products such as Quarta Software.
The Returns on Investing in Quality Management
Economic benefits in terms of savings for medium-sized organizations (50 to 500 employees) consistently remain in the hundreds of thousands of euros range and can be realized as early as the first year after project completion, with an average payback period typically below twelve months.
The most significant sources of savings are found in the following efficiency and effectiveness chapters, which also include the relative impact observed in projects related to Quarta Software.
Process Automation: The Most Important Source of Benefits
The most significant economic benefits always come from process automation, as processes without adequate Quality Management automation tend to be ineffective. Key examples include deviation management processes in product quality, complaint management processes, audit processes, as well as Quality Issue and CAPA (Corrective Actions Preventive Actions) processes. There are two sources of economic advantage in automating these processes:
- The time spent annually by employees managing non-automated processes, such as gathering documents, creating summaries, and managing the process itself.
- The elimination or reduction of losses related to production quality issues.
Document Management in Quality Management
Document management, briefly mentioned in the previous paragraph, is the second major benefit obtained by implementing IT and automated processes in Quality Management. Managing new documents related to quality flows and archiving/retrieving already created documents when needed are significant sources of time loss and unnecessary activities, such as email sharing, physically signing documents approvable via workflows, and collective discussion in meetings on topics that could be quickly analyzed asynchronously via digital tools.
Training Management
A crucial aspect not to overlook when discussing the benefits of Quality and Quality Management processes is the training management for Quality and Production staff. Without automated processes, it becomes not only more challenging to train staff in managing these processes, since all materials would need to be essentially created from scratch and based on manual and paper-based processes, but it is also much harder to identify further training needs and the effectiveness of training itself without an objective reference point provided by automated processes.
Thus, Quality and Quality Management can indeed be significant sources of revenue for manufacturing companies, provided they accept the challenge of achieving a one-year payback and use tools employed by world-leading companies such as Blulink and especially Quarta Software.
For further information, contact marketing@blulink.com
