Round-up: CQI branch events

CQI Surrey and Sussex Branch

The Surrey and Sussex Branch held its recent CQI event at the Hartsfield Manor Hotel, Surrey, with guest speaker, Kevin Rayment of Network Rail, on the subject of Design for Reliability (DFR) within the rail industry.

Darren Russell, Secretary of CQI Surrey and Sussex Branch, said: “Rayment provided an interesting and intuitive talk on Network Rail’s infrastructure Standard that suppliers of equipment to the industry must work to, thus ensuring that DFR is taken into account at the beginning of the design process with the aim of making the rail industry a safer place.”

Rayment explained to attendees that learning from past rail disasters and from other industries familiar to DFR, shows there needs to be a process in place to make infrastructure more reliable. This is why the Reliability Team was formed within Network Rail and dedicated to DFR.

Network Rail’s infrastructure Standard came about due to a number of reasons including a lack of training, support for tried and tested tools and methodologies, clear requirements, and learning from past failures.

Russell added: “With its 79-step process procedure, Rayment demonstrated the Standard’s benefits for new infrastructure technology and it’s need to cover the older technology. The process considers whole life costs such as maintenance, life span and disposal costs. DFR is considered right at the start of the process to de-risk product failures, with its use of tools such as Failure Mode and Effects Analysis and Root Cause Analysis. Additional benefits of the standard include reduced maintenance tasks and annual delay times.”

CQI and IRCA Taiwan Branch

Following an inaugural meeting held at the end of 2018, the Taiwan branch was officially formed in June 2019. Its first event was held at the Postal Museum in the capital city Taipei.

Murli Mohan Mukkamula, Freelance Quality Consultant, and Jeffrey Monk, CQP FCQI, Managing Director at consultancy JEMO, were the speakers.

Mukkamula gave a presentation on the CQI and the benefits of joining and another on the digitisation of quality management. Monk introduced the CQI mentoring scheme and also explored the benefits of an ISO 9001 quality management system.

The branch is now planning its next event after the Chinese New Year, and will be actively seeking speakers.

CQI Birmingham Branch

Amandip Sandhu CQP FCQI, Quality Engineer at Bromford Technologies, tells us what happened at the latest CQI Birmingham Branch event.

It was an excellent CQI event with Hannah Foley, Managing Director of YAK CX as speaker. Foley is an experienced FTSE 100 B2B customer experience (CX) leader, certified CX practitioner, and co-author of Customer Experience: 22 international CX professionals share their current strategies for achieving impact and visibility using best practice CX. She runs a Warwickshire-based customer experience consultancy, helping businesses to be more resilient, consistent, and prepared for growth.

Foley explained where you can focus your attention to get results and help you to build a short, medium and long-term strategy, to ensure your organisation is focused on the customer and the right activities to deliver value. This could take the form of colleague engagement plans, service standards and procedures, product improvements, operational ways of working, leadership behaviours or customer improvement and engagement recommendations.

Delegates learned some techniques to help their organisation put the customer at the heart of its growth strategy by gaining knowledge about the following:

• Why customer experience is a growth strategy

• How to focus on greater customer understanding

• Listening to and seeking out customer feedback

• How a CX maturity assessment could be a great starting point.

Overall, the presentation was delivered with great passion and we’d like to thank all the members and guests for supporting the branch events.

CQI North of Scotland

Raymond Davies, Lecturer and Course Leader for quality management and procurement and supply chain management at Robert Gordon University (RGU), at a branch meeting held in December introduced the audience to three students undertaking the MSc Procurement and Supply Chain Management course at RGU. The speakers were Ramatu Dauda Aliyu, Chinwe Mwankti, and Daniel Agyei Duodo.

Aliyu told the audience that prior to undertaking the course, her knowledge of quality extended to brand names only. She had not associated quality with the infrastructure of her country until considering the improvements she could work on when returning to Nigeria as part of the National Youth Service Corps.

In a separate presentation, Mwankti told the audience that she is a Logistics Officer in the Abuja office of Ocean Marine Solutions, which works in partnership with the Nigerian Navy. Among other services, the organisation provides an armed escort for oil and gas vessels and provides protection against pipeline vandalism. It is Mwankti’s intention to make a proposal to her senior management regarding improvements and she intends to propose the use of a quality management system. She said the quality module in the Procurement and Supply Chain Management MSc provided her with the idea for her proposal.

The presentations were well received, there was a high level of audience participation, and they provided a different slant on quality management.