Create sustainable growth by driving the quality of your products and services.

Quality Management  Consulting

About This Practice

Quality consultants will help you re-shape and re-focus you culture to concentrate on the quality of your work processes, the people, the systems and the structures. Many organizations work to achieve one of the international quality awards and through this process decide to change their culture to focus more on quality.

How We Can Help

We will help you optimize and manage the quality of your organization, products and services. We provide guidance with development of a Strategic Quality Plan as well as Quality Teams. We can help analyze and improve your Key Business Processes and help you implement Benchmarking to determine the effectiveness of your processes, systems and structures.

Outcome

We aim to help you meet or exceed the needs of your organization’s stakeholders and customers and positively impact your organization and/or departments bottom-line.
We have helped our clients eliminate waste and redundancies using Lean. And provided Kaizen to reduce their new product development cycle time and costs as well as time to get their products to market.

Getting Started

Unless you have 100% customer satisfaction there is room for improvement. Contact us to discuss your requirements.

Quality Culture Assessment™ (QCA™)

Background

Individually and organizationally we can research product and service quality faster and easier than ever before. Whenever we buy a product or use a service we search Google, Amazon and other sites to read reviews and make our decisions based on these assessments. We can easily lose a sale and will find it challenging to regain it.

Customers today, through technologies, are empowered in their decision making. When must ensure that they don’t receive any early warning signs through social media and/or other search options. We want to reduce the likelihood that any product and/or service product problems are eliminated.

Why Assess Quality Culture?

A culture of quality is the critical component to quality success. Most organizational cultures lack the elements to create a culture of quality. A culture of quality provides a foundation that fosters the implementation of quality programs.

The cultural aspects of quality are the most essential predictors of quality outcomes for an organization. Assessing our current culture of quality helps identify the extent to which all employees understanding our philosophy and approach to quality as well as the degree to which they have integrated quality in everything they do.

Our definition of a successful culture of quality is:
“An organization that has reached a high level of excellence in the establishment of a quality management environment demonstrates an ability to drive the business planning process into the realization of quality initiatives and projects that use a consistent methodology, tools and templates focused on both the delivery of quality and a customer focus to achieve organizational success.”

Process

The Quality Culture Assessment™ (QCA™) will:

  • Assess the current quality culture.
  • Provide information regarding how the culture supports quality.
  • Gauge the extent to which all levels of employees embrace quality in their work.
  • Identify and address the internal organizational forces likely to drive or impede creating a strong quality culture.
  • Define specific actions that need to be undertaken to create a strong culture of quality.

Get You Ready for Innovation

Next we will have you complete our proprietary Innovation Culture AssessmentTM to assess your organization’s readiness for innovation and to determine the gaps to fill to re-shape your organization’s culture so as to support innovation.

Getting Started

Contact us to discuss your requirements. We will help you understand your current quality culture and help you to create the actions needed to create a strong culture of quality.

Success Stories

Applying Strategic Quality Planning to Update Quality Policies

One division within a large government department had created a quality policy manual about 15 years ago.  Nobody within the organization had updated this manual since its creation and now there were many quality problems throughout the division.  This client brought us in to help them develop a Strategic Quality Plan that would lead to the right direction for quality in the division and provide measurable quality initiatives.  The outcome of our work was a new and successful direction for this division plus a new policy manual for quality with improved quality processes and procedures.   

Using Quality Planning to Improve Customer Service for a Retail Grocery Chain

This grocery chain wanted to improve their bottom-line by increasing their customer service levels and their effectiveness and efficiency.  They created a steering committee to develop the best strategy to manage these challenges.  The steering committee asked us to help them develop a Strategic Quality Plan.  Our planning process helped the steering committee to develop several key strategies.  In order to execute each of the strategies we formed sub-committees of employees; which the steering committee were to oversee.  We then took each sub-committee through a planning session to develop a plan for implementation of the strategies.  In these planning sessions, each committee identified potential barriers to success and then established ways to overcome them.  There was a variety of barriers to overcome including: culture, lack of structures and processes and lack of quality tools. We addressed these issues with consulting, quality training and coaching.  By engaging employees throughout the planning process we were able to help this organization improve their bottom line and received very positive customer feedback.

Testimonials

Business Improvement Architects was asked to develop a customized, standard protocol and methodology that could be used for all of their projects. bia™ was highly successful because we recognized that all levels within the organization could benefit from application of a consistent methodology and our protocol addressed this opportunity.

"Business Improvement Architects drove the process to develop a standard protocol and methodology for all levels of the organization to apply consistently and developed a customized GWL Project Management Approach."

Director of IT, Great West Life Realty

Recognizing the importance of project management in ensuring the success of quality initiatives, ASQ asked bia™ to facilitate all Project Management training sessions as part of their on-going public and in-house programming. ASQ has continued to use Business Improvement Architects over the past 10 years for Project Management Training as well as training in Process Improvement, Strategic Quality Planning and Creating Visions and Strategies for Government Services. More recently, bia™ has developed webinars and virtual training courses for ASQ.

"bia™ is an organization that continually meets our high quality standards. They consistently rate highly in their delivery, class management, use of applicable and practical examples of concepts to the theory and ideas they are presenting and their knowledge of and experience with the subject matter they are teaching."

Program Designer, ASQ Learning Offerings, American Society for Quality

"I literally walked into the class on day 1 with NO project management knowledge. The presentation, exercises and reference sheets have provided me with the confidence and tools needed to be a successful project manager. The most significant thing I learned was how to efficiently manage my time within projects (both small and large)."

Course participant, ASQ Conference

Business Improvement Architects (bia™) has worked in a variety of areas of the Ontario Public Service including several Ministries and Leadership Centers. Our work has covered a broad range of consulting and training assignments including: research on Benchmarking within a government environment, customer service training, coaching project managers and teams through major government initiatives, training the leadership in the areas of quality and project management and training staff on the skills of Kaizen (process management) and project management.

"Business Improvement Architect's facilitation and processes have effectively met our needs. The training has been engaging as well as practical and informative. We have found that our people are able to apply the learning to their workplace."

Assistant Deputy Minister, Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities

bia™ worked with the IR-Security Technologies to develop and implement a customized Quality Management and Project Management Curriculum for project/process teams and leaders. Attendance, while not mandatory, has been enthusiastic with positive feedback about the direct applicability of the knowledge learned to the workplace.

"Over the years we have found great value in working with Business Improvement Architects because their programs have been highly effective. There have been a number of positive endeavors demonstrated by the participants including applying the project management process to an existing project in order to bring it back on track. Others have successfully7 applied the knowledge directly to a number of new projects."

Director of Manufacturing, Ingersoll-Rand Company