Tag Archives: quality management

Quality Management Can’t Be Optional Anymore

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Here is an unfortunate truth: the story of the COVID-19 pandemic is one of epic quality failures in almost every area imaginable.

While there have been some admirable successes, such as the food and beverage organizations that have ensured the continued safe delivery of food supplies to most regions, failures both large and small have caused an untold amount of damage to the infrastructure of society and business. Arguably, these quality failures have worsened the impact of the pandemic, including economic devastation and even a higher death toll. 

Here are just a few of the quality failures that will become prominent themes in the narrative of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

PPE Shortages and Quality Failures 

Almost immediately after the start of the pandemic, healthcare organizations worldwide faced a critical shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) such as the crucial N95 respirators that would protect doctors, nurses and other frontline workers from infection. There were … Read more...

8 Checklists for 2020: A Quick Way to Check In and Level Up Your EHSQ Programs

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These checklists from Intelex offer practical advice about managing aspects of safety like slips and falls and electrical hazards, help you touch base with employees during these stressful times, offer insight into your organization’s preparedness planning, provide guidance on quality issues like voice of customer and 5S, and much more!

Don’t Be Shocked – A Checklist for Electrical Safety – While the objective of protecting the safety of their employees continues to be a strong focus for employers, there still needs to be more checks in place to reduce injuries.

Embrace the New Age of Digital Learning: Training Management in the Age of COVID-19 – Learning and training is more important than ever. When the world moves quickly, sometimes in unexpected ways, we need to make sure our training can keep up and give our teams what they need to survive and thrive.

Back to Work Checklist for Mindful Leaders – While strategic vision … Read more...

World Quality Day: COVID-19 Accelerates Push for Quality Maturity in Life Sciences

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COVID-19 Quality Supply Chains FDA

COVID-19 has brought unprecedented challenges to quality and supply chain management within the life sciences industry. Drug shortages caused by unprecedented supply and demand pressures continue to be significant challenges for many life sciences companies today and for the general public at large as the pandemic continues to escalate.


The Fragile State of the Pharmaceutical Supply Chains in the US


According to a recent report by the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP), the US domestic pharmaceutical supply chain remains in a state of heightened vulnerability, with almost three quarters of the critical drugs required to treat COVID-19 patients facing significant shortages. The current shortages have brought quality management into the spotlight for many life science organizations and have tightened the focus on issues of quality maturity across the larger pharmaceutical manufacturing value chain.

Beyond supply chain disruption, additional factors including implementation of new public health safety protocols, … Read more...

Pivoting Towards Progress: Driving Agility in Quality and Supplier Management by Foolproofing Supply Chains

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As the saying goes: “Progress doesn’t always follow a straight line.” No matter how severe short-term challenges can be, what is critical is that you’re always moving forward.

While predicting future changes or disruptions is next to impossible (particularly in the business world), planning for every major scenario is crucial and is essentially what sets forward-thinking leaders apart from the rest.


Navigating through Disruption: Current Challenges in Quality and Supplier Management


While no industry or sector is immune to the effects and aftereffects of the COVID-19 pandemic, there are some that have been harder hit than others. The quality and supplier management space just happen to fall into that category. Within these practice areas, supply chains have gone through a severe disruption.

While there is a breadth of challenges that supply chain leaders have been facing, the most common ones include the following:

Type of DisruptionHow They are Brought
… Read more...

Driving Progress through a Paradigm Shift: The Importance of a Strong Safety and Quality Culture to the Oil and Gas Sector

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In the business world, the word progress is commonly associated with technological advancements, as well as developments in processes and procedures. There are additional drivers to progress and their significance can also have powerful results.

In the oil and gas sector, studies have shown that for companies to be successful in the long run, it’s critical for them to incorporate a strong culture of safety and quality.

How about we take a step back to understand the full picture?

The Traditional View of How Oil and Gas Companies Should Operate


While traditionalists will claim that an industry strongly based on scientific processes and technology don’t need to focus on employee-centered processes or procedures, their thinking has since been proven to be antiquated and potentially dangerous.

How so, you ask? Well, empirical research has proven that high-reliability organizations (HROs), which by nature, have a labor-heavy component to their operations, have shown … Read more...

Using an Integrated Management System in Your Organization

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Many of today’s organizations use management systems to establish policies and procedures for achieving their objectives. Most frequently, organizations have management systems to support quality, health and safety, environment and sustainability, and data privacy. Management systems are not, by definition, technology solutions. Instead, they are conceptual models of the organizational processes and responsibilities that help coordinate everything in the direction of a common goal. However, while a management system can theoretically use paper-based manual processes, the increasing complexity of the global marketplace and the attendant compliance requirements mean that most organizations will need a reliable cloud-based technology solution to support their management systems. 

Management systems are often segregated from one another in the organization. For example, the quality management system might be separate from the safety management system. This creates the risk of isolated responses to incidents that impact each individual management system. It also means considerable duplication of effort, which wastes both human and financial resources. To … Read more...

How Quality 4.0 Can Support Successful Digital Transformation

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Digital transformation is a way of using cutting-edge technology to solve traditional problems and create new models for knowledge organization, revenue generation, and innovation. Since 2010, the topic of digital transformation has been the focus of considerable attention in every industry. It holds the promise of digital platforms that provide a single-source-of-truth for collecting, analyzing, and sharing data and information across the organization to allow immediate, data-driven decision making that can help to confront any operational challenge.

However, many organizations fall into the trap of believing that a successful digital transformation project is simply a matter of purchasing the correct technology, and that the technology itself will dictate the behaviour and processes that lead to organizational excellence. As a result, many digital transformation projects collapse and fail before creating any meaningful change in the organization.

Quality 4.0 can help prevent this. It’s a digital transformation strategy that emphasizes quality and … Read more...

Use Software to Meet Your ISO 9001:2015 Requirements

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ISO 9001 is the most popular certification standard in the world. It outlines a framework for improving quality and a vocabulary of understanding for any organization looking to provide products and services that consistently meet the requirements and expectations of customers and other relevant parties in the most efficient manner possible. First published in 1987, the latest iteration, ISO 9001:2015, incorporates risk-based thinking, increased responsibilities for leadership, and a high-level structure that allows for easier certification of integrated management systems that include other standards like ISO 45001:2018 and ISO 14001:2015. 

ISO 9001:2015 can help organizations in many industries improve their processes, enhance customer satisfaction, and improve business results. In some industries, such as automotive, health sciences, and construction, certification is considered essential, if not mandatory, to compete effectively in the marketplace and to meet applicable statutory and regulatory requirements. In other areas, such as education, organizations have taken innovative approaches to using the guidance of ISO … Read more...

Canadian Honey Producers Stung by Sophisticated Food Fraud

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Food fraud is big business. Criminal organizations around the world earn millions of dollars annually by cutting high-quality food products with cheaper substitutes to increase profits. The practice is so ubiquitous throughout the food industry that food protection agencies refer to it as economically motivated adulteration (EMA) The consequences of this practice can include reputational damage to respected food brands, public health crises resulting from adulteration using hazardous elements designed to avoid standard integrity testing, and financial damage to legitimate producers who can’t compete with cheaper adulterated products.  

According to a recent news story, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) has been conducting targeted surveillance on international producers of adulterated honey entering the Canadian market since 2018. By analyzing 240 samples of imported honey, CFIA determined that one-fifth of the samples advertised as pure honey are adulterated with corn syrup, rice syrup, and cane sugar syrup. As a result of the inspection, … Read more...

Ensuring Food Safety with Quality Management Software

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Food safety characteristics have a very close connection to food quality characteristics, and while all food safety characteristics relate to quality, not all food quality characteristics relate to safety. Food quality, according to Alli (2016), relates to ensuring that products meet the established requirements for food characteristics. Garvin (1987) describes eight dimensions for measuring the characteristics of food quality: performance, features, reliability, conformance, durability, serviceability, aesthetics, and perceptions. Food safety, which relates to the characteristics that have the potential to be harmful to human health by causing illness, falls under the performance and reliability dimensions of food quality. Food safety characteristics are therefore specific kinds of food quality characteristics.

By recognizing that food safety and food quality have an integrated relationship, organizations can bring quality methods and tools to bear on the difficulties of navigating food safety regulations in their FSMS (Food Safety Management System). With food supply chains now … Read more...