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Navigating the complexities of compliance, performance and quality

  • Opinion
  • Standards
  • Author: Willy Vandenbrande
    Published:

    Today – in a highly regulated market – compliance alone does not distinguish you from your competitors. Organisations must go beyond compliance to achieve performance. Willy Vandenbrande has led a successful career in quality management for over 35 years – first as a quality manager and later as a consultant. He shares his thoughts and insights on the historically complex relationship between compliance and quality.

    Imagine you are having dinner with friends, and in conversation about what you do for a living, you try to explain your job as a quality manager. You proudly say you ensure everything meets the highest standards, only to be met with a blank lack of understanding. Explaining the role and responsibilities of a quality manager is challenging and can feel like a losing battle. Reverting to the trusty ISO 9001 standard to help clarify and describe the true nature of what a quality manager does, could lead to even more confusion.  

    Examining the impact and challenges of standards  

    I have always had a complex relationship with ISO 9001 – and compliance in general. One reason is the overly complicated language standards are written in. Clearly a widely experienced challenge, which has prompted a book promising to explain ISO 9001:2015 in ‘plain English’. Standards organisations are making a fortune out of these standards, so the least they could do is to make them accessible.

    The second reason is more fundamental. In hindsight, I wonder whether the ISO 9000 series of standards were a good thing for quality. In the 1980s quality management was very prominent, conferences drew large crowds and our guru’s, like Deming and Juran, were very popular. To a large extent this had to do with the performance of the Japanese industry. It became clear that quality was not a cost but an investment with a high return of increased market share and profitability due to greater efforts applied to mitigating poor quality. Quality managers were important and present at the strategic level of organisations. And then came ISO 9000. 

    Driving total quality management through performance 

    It could be argued that in quality we focused first on performance and added compliance later. As a result, complying was seen as the ultimate proof of performance, which it clearly is not.

    In fact, the one thing that does not distinguish you from your competitor is compliance. They are all compliant – they would not be your competitors otherwise.

    Willy Vandenbrande, Consultant

    While this seems obvious, many quality professionals face the challenge of convincing their organisation that it needs to go beyond compliance to performance. Often, the most important, and possibly only, responsibility of quality departments is to manage the system and pass certification audits. Consequently, this reduces the quality professionals' influence and, in some instances, creates a barrier to achieving total quality management.   

    Today most of my work lies in promoting the relationship between quality and sustainability. Recently, the EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and its accompanying European Sustainability Reporting Standard (ESRS) have been accepted as legal requirements. While most people applaud it, this could also lead to complying and reporting accordingly being the only action taken. We may be destroying our unique biosphere in total compliance. 

    It is critical that the quality profession continues to motivate and support organisations towards performance excellence, both in quality and in sustainability. 

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