Unlocking value through quality management excellence

Across at least the last 25 years (based on the CQI’s experience), the quality profession has been struggling to clearly articulate the value of quality management to organisations across all sectors. Anecdotal evidence suggests that senior managers in quality are striving to have their voices heard at senior levels when it comes to both improving the quality of products and services and decreasing exposure to risk.

Articulating the value of quality management 

Over the past 70 years, the effects of quality management on customer, supplier, regulatory, operational and societal outcomes have been shown. Sustained improvements in customer satisfaction, revenue growth, operational efficiency and profitability over 3-to-5-year periods have been discovered¹.

However, large-scale industrial disasters, failed IT implementations and life-threatening product defects are proof of the danger of ineffective quality management. So why is the quality profession still struggling to be heard around the board table? 

The CQI is addressing this question by seeking to discover how to articulate the value of quality management, not just in its totality (ie as Total Quality Management) but as a set of management interventions that, in the right combination, and in the right context, will deliver value to meet a range of stakeholder needs and expectations.

Professionals need more than a generic ‘why quality?’ elevator pitch. They must be able to articulate to leaders and the wider business how they can help them meet objectives and deliver strategic ambition.

Mike Turner, Head of Profession, CQI 

Key research discoveries and insights  

In 2024, we launched a research project that began with a comprehensive review of available literature to identify existing findings. To account for the impact of contemporary trends like digital transformation and sustainable development, this study deliberately restricted its search to publications from the last 20 years. It has made some important emerging discoveries:  

• Outcomes from prior studies indicate that predicting the value delivered from a programme of quality improvement is not easy; positive impact cannot always be expected. This would imply that there are other factors that can mediate the relationship between quality management and financial performance. 
• The recognised dimensions for measuring the impact of quality management remain (customer, cost/value, stakeholder, societal), but the ways in which components of quality management affect these outcomes are still unclear. 
• The demands of sustainability and the need to assuredly adopt digital technologies are creating the opportunity for quality management to become strategically more important than it has done, arguably, in the past 30 years. 
• There remains no simple solution for the profession. The quality manager/leader must fulfill a modified role and develop new competencies if they are to exploit this opportunity. 

Strategic quality for future success  

These findings point to the need for a specific type of conceptual model of 'cause and effect'; a tool that identifies new factors and enablers to build the links between quality management and strategic value-add.  

This is our focus for the next phase of work that will run between April and October 2025. This tool will help to ensure that quality leaders are equipped to promote quality management as a strategic tool, capable of helping their organisations navigate a path through these turbulent times to future success. 

We look forward to continuing our collaboration with Cranfield University as we enter this next phase of research. We are also delighted to share our research insights at the International Conference on Quality (ICQ) in Japan this September. Explore the ICQ2025 programme to learn more about our keynote sessions on the value of quality management.

¹ The X-Factor – Winning Performance Through Business Excellence, published by The Europea Centre for Business Excellence