Bucher Municipal is one of the world's leading suppliers of municipal vehicles, from street sweepers and sewer cleaning tankers to winter maintenance and refuse collection trucks.
The multinational company's recent 'Project Spirit' aimed to combine and unify three disparate quality management systems into a single framework.
Building an international multi-site quality culture centred around two key goals: ensuring 'the right communication to the right person at the right time', and providing 'the right information for the right site, product and user'.
The Bucher Municipal Sweepers quality team identified the opportunity to achieve their objectives with a centralised, scalable, multilingual electronic documentation and auditing system, and adopted EQMS in 2018 to roll out across five territories.
Quality Director John Halley and Quality Manager James Brind discuss the EQMS project and how they plan to use Document Manager and Audit Manager to make the Bucher Municipal business stronger and more collaborative than ever. Watch the video or read the transcript below.
Qualsys: Why have Bucher Municipal decided to implement an electronic quality solution?
John: Our quality and environmental management systems have been combined in Project Spirit. This has left us with a number of legacy documents which are controlled in different ways, distributed in different ways, maintained in different ways. We needed to find a solution which brought all those together, to be managed in the same way.
James: One person could be working to one version of a document, one person to another. And with that, the result could be different - and it's not intended to be that way. So it's important we brought everything together in a single location, and know that everyone is working to the same revision of a document.
Qualsys: And how will Document Manager help you as a business?
James: Well Document Manager will provide that single go-to for all employees.
John: Document Manager certainly provides us with a platform to manage our documents and improve the centralisation of our quality culture. One tool to help document control, distribution, approval, training across the whole organisation.
Recognised by the whole organisation, accessible by the whole organisation, it'll help drive our quality culture forward.
James: Ultimately, everyone in the Bucher Municipal workforce wants to be competent at their job. To be competent at their job means they need to access the right information quickly and efficiently. EQMS will help our employees do that.
1000 Bucher Municipal employees in Latvia, Denmark, Switzerland,
Germany and the UK will access their documentation
from a single secure multilingual source with EQMS
Qualsys: What about Audit Manager?
John: Audit Manager will help us manage our audits in a far more structured and formal way. It'll help us plan and distribute and communicate our audits ahead of time, and share those reports when the audits are completed. It'll also help us keep track of any non-conformances that we need to improve upon.
Ultimately, everyone in the Bucher Municipal workforce wants to be competent at their job. To be competent at their job means they need to access the right information quickly and efficiently. EQMS will help our employees do that.
- James Brind, Quality Manager
The Bucher team recognised that information-sharing
was crucial for a seamless quality culture
James: Our organisation is complex. We've got hundreds of suppliers to audit externally, and internally we've got four management systems that we need to be auditing.
It's quite a complex challenge to plan all those audits. So to have a tool where we can plan and deliver the audits, follow up on non-conformity, and drive improvement through that tool is going to be a great benefit for us.
Pre-built checklists, mobile integration and automated follow-up workflows
will support a simplified and more structured internal auditing programme
Qualsys: Why did you choose our solution in the end?
James: We looked at a number of tools from a number of different suppliers. EQMS is a clean user interface, it's simple to use, and it provides us with what we need today.
One tool to help document control, distribution, approval, training across the whole organisation. Recognised by the whole organisation, accessible by the whole organisation, it'll help drive our quality culture forward.
- John Halley, Quality Director
John: It seemed to be the best fit for the challenges that we had. It's scalable for us, which means we can start with the Sweepers organisation, the core part of the organisation, then extend it to America and Korea should we choose to do so.
We can also extend it to other parts of the division, including Tankers, Winter or Refuse.
A key goal for Bucher's software project was delivering 'the right information to the right person at the right time'. Document Manager was identified as the best solution
Qualsys: What does success look like for your project with us?
John: Success will be if everyone has this tool on their desktops and laptops and use it as the first port of call for document retrieval and document management.
James: It's moving away from where we are today, it's having a tool where if someone wants a document or wants to know a piece of information, they will think automatically: "I'm going to go to EQMS".
Bucher Municipal's EQMS system is available in English, German,
Latvian and Danish to support end user engagement
Qualsys: And what would you like your staff to do now?
James: We're going to be starting the project immediately. We're starting with a document discovery exercise; today we've got an understanding of what kinds of documents we use in the organisation, but we'll be working with certain key people in the organisation to understand: "what kinds of documents do you actually have in your department?"
We want to gain that understanding in order to build it into the tool.
If someone wants a document or wants to know a piece of information, they will think automatically: "I'm going to go to EQMS".
- James Brind, Quality Manager
John: Get engaged. The more people who embrace the tool and see what the tool can do for them, the better. If people can get engaged now, it will help us with our document discovery process so we know what documents are in our business, how important they are, who controls them, and how they need to be managed in the future.
More resources
To see how other multinational businesses use EQMS for enterprise quality management, download our case study booklet.
Or try our free business case toolkit to access a range of resources for understanding, evaluating and selecting the right software solution for your business:
Share your thoughts on this article