Quality Leaders Share Their 2015 Review and 2016 Resolutions

As 2015 draws to a close, many businesses will be reviewing the past year and making plans for 2016. 

We asked Quality Professionals across the globe to share some of their lessons from the past 12 months. Thank you to all of you who joined in by sharing your lessons learnt and your plans for the year ahead. 

Here are some of the responses: 

"Quality Professionals now need a solid business understanding and have to integrate this in all quality processes. Solid communications and an open dialog have been key."

Pufal, Head of Compliance Management

"Continue taking small steps and not thinking that everything can change in a day."

Flannigan, Environment Consultant

"[One of my main issues has been] lack of support from senior management teams who place delivery above quality. Selling quality to meet individual benefits works." 

Jeff, HSEQ Manager

"Placing quality above delivery."

Hedge, Quality Engineer

"Technology alone doesn't deliver transformation, clever application can. Analytics has been essential in optimising processes."

Parkins, Quality Co-ordinator 

"Not all business is good business."

Stevens, Advance Quality Engineer

"We have been negatively affected by the differences in knowledge levels between staff members. We split the team in order to improve our capacity building outcome and the ROI."

Nunez, Quality Training Consultant

"Changing the culture of quality control to quality assurance and training to lean six sigma methodology." 

Andrews, Production Quality Operations Manager 

"Improving supplier quality. Rolling out supplier auditing and meeting compliance standards." 

Vastmans, European Lead Auditor 

"Travelling the world to demonstrate to organisations that the 2015 changes to ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 are significant. If we can ensure this is understood then we've a common foundation on which we can build better management systems."

Green, Head of Technical Services at a Professional Institute 

"Disrupting "the way we do things around here" with quality processes." 

Shaw, Quality Lead

"Making the transition from ISO 9001:2008 to ISO 9001:2015 as smooth as possible." 

Quality Manager

"Building a quality handbook that everyone can use." 

Quality Manager

"I realised early on that whenever I assumed an operative is working and stop monitoring them, bad behaviour quickly returns. Using quality tools and procedures to continually monitor behaviour and prevent bad practices worked really well throughout 2015." 

McDonald, Manufacturing Quality Engineer

A Few New Year's Resolutions: 

We also asked Quality Professional's what their plans were for 2016 by telling us three of their New Year's Resolutions. If you have your own New Year's Resolutions, please feel free to share them in the comments section below or email us.

Here are some of the New Year's Resolutions we recieved:

1. To succeed on finishing a Training Program for BRC Standard by 2016 third quarter.
2. To approve at least three internal audits (Self assesment) by Q3 before calling certification body.
3. To approve initial audit in full with certification body before the end of the year.

Nunez, Quality Training Consultant

1. Apply and record use of Quality Tools to change culture and expectations.
2. Condense customer returns and issues details into common streamlined channels to reduce processing time waste and improve response times and effectiveness.
3. Prepare company to get certified to ISO 9001:2015 in 2018.

McDonald, Manufacturing Quality Engineer

1. Good quality people and training.
2. Customer satisfaction.
3. Realtime monitoring system.

Anupam, Mineral Resources company

1. Persuade those with resources to cooperate.
2. Formulate contingency plans and identify those who can really deliver.
3. Not waste my money and time on efforts that are less likely to succeed.

Gopel, Director

New Year, New Start?

Good luck and best wishes to everyone in 2016.

If you have ambitious New Year's Resolutions, EQMS can provide transformational results. With a number of governance, risk and compliance management modules to choose from, customers benefit from a company-wide centralised system. 

Download the EQMS Buying Toolkit for a range of resources including: product datasheets, stakeholder engagement templates, building a business case guides and much more.