Quality management is the act of overseeing different tasks and activities in an organization to attain a desired level of standards. The four key components that make up quality management include:

• Quality planning: This is the process of preparing a quality management plan. It describes the steps through which quality management is implemented.

• Quality Control: This is the inspection and testing of the quality management plan to ensure that it is fit for application.

• Quality Assurance: A planned action that ensures the quality management plan meets its specified requirements.

• Quality improvement: These are the overtime changes made on quality planning, control, and assurance to improve their effectiveness.

The end goal of any organization is to ensure excellent customer satisfaction and promote business growth. To meet the two critical objectives, enterprises implement quality management tools at every level of operation.  

The top three issues affecting quality management across various disciplines include: 

1. Resistance to the adoption of new technologies

A business needs to improve its tools and processes to grow continually. Thus, technological innovations such as Veeva QMS Software system help streamline quality management procedures implemented at various levels of operations. If people resist the use of such technologies, quality operations suffer stagnation.

Some of the reasons why stakeholders resist the adoption of new quality management technologies include:

• Lack of consultation between management and employees
• Threats to expertise as some employees fear their roles might be outshined by technology
• Lack of the required skills to leverage new tools
• Inadequate support from upper management in the form of resources 
•  Organizational tendencies to clinging on legacy systems as a result of the substantial investments they required to set up

Since the implications of new quality management technologies are endless, businesses need to encourage the early and rapid adoption of technological tools in their quality planning. 

1. Finding, analyzing, and reporting of metrics critical to decision-making

Gathering, analysis, reporting, and utilization of data serves a significant role in informed decision-making. Globalization of business operations has set a new trend of big data, collected across various wings of operations.

Many quality management experts are aware of the tremendous impact data has on the growth of an enterprise. However, despite the advantages associated with big data, many businesses experience difficulties in managing the collected information. In as much as finding quality management metrics can be easy, it is harder to distinguish which data is relevant to growth. 

Some of the measures that quality management personnel can implement to find and use the most critical metrics effectively include:  

• Deploy good data quality management policies
• Presenting data in meaningful ways using quality management data analytics software
• Continually evolve data-driven quality management goals
• Avoid over-reliance on past experiences as business environments are dynamic
• Learn to analyze and understand quality management data properly

1. Viewing quality management as a departmental-based rather than company-wide initiative

Since time immemorial, quality control has been considered the responsibility of the department set to implement it. Consequently, most departments work independently of quality management taskforce. This is a culture that needs to be overhauled to make quality management more effective.

Instead of operating quality management procedures in isolation of other departments, all aspects of the organization needs to be captured into these initiatives. A systematic approach should be used to bridge the existing gaps between quality management and all wings of operations associated with a company.