Integrated Quality is Important

Brands are important. Many factors play into why we as consumers make decisions to buy one product over another or patronize one restaurant over another. Certainly, price plays a factor, but in general, most consumers gravitate toward what they feel most comfortable with — they gravitate towards brands that their families have always used because those brands have been reliable and up to the standards that they expect.

With the methods and speed of information sharing today, consumers now have a wide and public platform to voice their concerns. So, the ability to react quickly and decisively to issues that arise is more important than ever.

The Landscape Around Quality Has Shifted

For example:

• The FDA Food Safety Modernization Act shifted the FDA’s focus from responding to preventing contamination:

  • Facilities required to have written plans to prevent food safety problems

  • More frequent inspections of facilities, based on risk

  • Importers have responsibility to verify that their “foreign” suppliers have adequate preventive controls in place to ensure the food they produce is safe

  • Provisions exist for secure electronic data sharing and mutual recognition of inspection reports

• The Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI) was launched by international food retailers to ensure consistent standards across the world:

  • Third-party auditors frequently audit facilities to GFSI-recognized standards rather than their own (in addition to customer requirements)

• J.D. Power and the Automotive Industry:

  • J.D. Power awards leading brands that consistently score highly on customer satisfaction.

  • Among the criteria judged: safety, comfort, performance, style, and quality of automobiles.

  • Automotive companies have translated the pressure to score high customer satisfaction into stricter quality requirements for their suppliers.

Integrating Design with Quality

As a result, retailers and manufacturers have been integrating their design with quality by pushing requirements to their suppliers, such as:

• Documenting quality parameters into their product specifications

• Requiring suppliers to go through a rigid qualification process

• Tracking supplier documents and their expiration

• Developing comprehensive supplier scorecarding as a peer approach to measuring suppliers

• Implementing process control management at the shop floor

• Tracking supplier auditing results in proprietary databases

• Developing comprehensive corrective action programs, both internally and externally

Even the services industry has been trying to incorporate quality into their offering(s) by looking at the customer’s entire experience — not just the service being provided. Modern PLM platforms extend this philosophy by linking design, production, and quality data in real time, creating a continuous feedback loop between teams. As described in our post “Product and Quality Management: A Match Made in Heaven”, organizations that unify PLM and QMS gain the visibility needed to detect and resolve quality issues early, before they escalate downstream.

Quality and Performance

Effective quality process implementation is supported by numerous statistics and data, demonstrating tangible benefits in financial performance, customer satisfaction, operational efficiency, and regulatory compliance.

Companies utilize Statistical Process Control (SPC) techniques to monitor and improve their processes, identify issues, and ensure consistent quality. A strong Quality Management System (QMS) can enhance product compliance and aid in meeting regulatory requirements.

Statistics show reduced defect rates and improved on-time delivery rates for companies with established quality systems. Additionally, quality management is strongly linked to customer satisfaction.

Companies with effective systems often experience higher customer retention rates and a decrease in customer complaints. Prioritizing quality management is associated with higher employee engagement, leading to increased productivity. Companies focusing on quality practices are also more likely to see improved market share and brand reputation.

In healthcare, QMS are linked to better clinical and administrative outcomes. In manufacturing, quality systems — especially those that bring product and quality together — are able to respond collaboratively and faster when issues are identified.

Evidence from Industry Studies

Studies show a clear link between implementing quality management and positive business outcomes across different industries:

• Increased sales and profitability: A study by the American Society for Quality (ASQ) found that companies that effectively implement quality management experienced a 9% increase in sales and a 26% increase in profitability.

• Higher on-time delivery rates: ASQ research also revealed that organizations with mature quality management systems averaged a 92% on-time delivery rate, compared to 74% for organizations without mature systems.

• Better customer retention: The Aberdeen Group found that companies with effective quality management systems have a 25% higher customer retention rate.

• Higher corporate survival rates: A Harvard Business School study of ISO 9001-certified companies found they had higher rates of “corporate survival, sales, employment growth, and wage increases” than uncertified counterparts. During the 2020–23 supply chain crises, certified manufacturers were 44% less likely to fail than their peers.

PLM and QMS Integration

As important as QMS is, how the system is implemented is just as important — stand-alone or integrated with a company’s Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solution. Arena explores this relationship in its white paper, “Does Quality Management Belong in PLM?”, which highlights why connecting product and quality data in one system accelerates compliance and reduces risk.

More than a decade earlier, the Aberdeen Group reached a similar conclusion study, “Integrating PLM and Quality Management”. Their analysis made it clear that having an integrated PLM and QMS solution drove better performance across key metrics:

Mean Performance

Cost of Quality

It is clear from this table that PLM and QMS interoperability results in positive impacts across a broad set of business areas. These findings remain relevant today, and as we’ve explored in our Oracle Agile PLM Q&A, companies using legacy PLM systems still face integration challenges when connecting product and quality workflows.

From Tactical to Strategic

When considering PLM and QMS interoperability, strategy and technical enablers need to be aligned. For leaders evaluating interoperability, our post “Avoid PLM Buyer’s Remorse” outlines what to look for in modules, integrations, and vendor ecosystems before expanding or replacing a PLM platform.

A large number of manufacturers have focused on strategies that are tactical in nature — minimizing scrap and increasing response time to non-conformances. Sustaining these improvements often requires proactive system care. Through PLM managed services, many organizations offload updates, monitoring, and integrations to maintain peak system performance and avoid gradual decline. These are important, but they aren’t elevating the strategic nature of quality to an organizational level.

Below are some key strategic actions that others have employed:

Conclusion

It is important for an organization to ask if they want to make quality visible across product development, manufacturing, and supply chain activities.

If the answer is “yes,” then it needs to commit to technology that supports it. That said, technology can’t be the only thing that delivers success.

The mindset toward quality — and the importance it plays in the lifecycle of products and processes — has to change. One of the best ways to enable that change is to integrate quality behavior within your PLM solution.

“Companies with PLM and Quality Management interoperability are nearly three times as likely as those without to make sure that standardized business processes are dynamically updated as best practices emerge. Establishing a standardized process is important, but it can also become a barrier to continuous improvement if these processes remain unchanged for a long period of time. Companies with PLM and Quality Management interoperability capture best practices to manage quality across the enterprise and are able to dynamically update these processes and implement them across operations. This enables the organization to be agile and flexible to changing internal (introduction of new products and processes) as well as external (government and customer regulations) needs of the manufacturing organization.”
— Aberdeen Group study

If you aren’t leveraging quality to improve your organization’s products and processes, I encourage you to look at what you have in place (or don’t) and raise the visibility and importance.

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