Business Continuity and Sustainability: The Convergence of QMS, SCM, and CRM

Tactical deployment of initiatives must be aligned with strategic targets and corporate goals in order to attain sustainability and continuity of a business in this emerging and dynamic global environment. Key performance indicators (KPIs) and balanced scorecards are tools that can effectively and proactively align customers (CRM), operations (QMS and MES), finance (SCF), and human capital (QMS and CRM) into sharp focus that supports continuity. Six Sigma is also a tool and is ever evolving and changing to meet the demands of global processes and systems. Six Sigma can not improve processes speed, but does ensure focus on doing the right activities correctly. Lean manufacturing (part of the six sigma tool belt) can not bring processes under statistical control or improve capabilities, but does ensure that the focus is on working on the right activities.

These tools support and allow a company to build a structure of sustainability. Business sustainability and continuity only truly happens when best practices (established through management’s commitment and dedication to Quality) becomes best habits of the entire workforce. This can be facilitated by

Making continuous improvement the way of conducting business.
Identifying primary inhibitors to process and system flows.
Exploiting optimization actions to forecast non-value added activities (wasteful steps and activities) and eliminating them.
Balancing top speed and efficiency in operations with the highest quality feasible with present process/system through strong focus on revenue generation, cost structures, and customer satisfaction.
Includes in all of the processes the necessity for receiving inspection, quality planning, and supplier surveillance (even internal suppliers).
Develop training programs and succession plans that are proactive and have the foresight to aggressively address future market demands and needs of customers.
Proactively addressing emerging trends on a strategic level will prepare a company for tomorrow’s tactical issues.

Product recalls negatively impact shareholder value (SHV) and erode the company’s and product branding efforts. This can be minimized by implementing continual improvements of Quality Management Systems (QMS), Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES), Supply Chain Management systems (SCM), and Customer Relationship Management systems (CRM) through

Reducing/eliminating the cost of poor quality.
Mitigating risks of recalls through aggressive risk assessments.
Ensuring compliance to regulatory and quality standards.
Dedication to improving consumer safety and satisfaction.

This brings what are the required actions and activities to achieve the means of sustainability, which include
Develop, establish, implement, and execute an effective Corrective Action Board (CAB) that has cross functional representation responsibilities for continuous process improvement as well as manage quality, tractability, and risk mitigation assessments at all levels and across all boundaries. Adopt and drive a QMS that facilitates a culture change.
Establish continual improvement QMS actions into real time reporting in order to increase visibility of product, process, and system information across all of the value chains. Eliminating silos of information and knowledge is a necessity of visibility, which supports business sustainability.
Ensure that traceability and threshold levels for non-conformance incidents are intertwined within every process and system. Automate collection of quality data from the manufacturing floor and suppliers.
Develop, establish, Implement, and execute and effective Continuous Improvement Team (CIT) that focuses on process traceability and non-conformance root causes across all boundaries.
Establish quality dashboards and supplier scorecards that ensure process data is exploited into actionable intelligence and knowledge for quicker decision-making.
Integrate process traceability data across all value chains that support visibility and performance across all boundaries.
Ensure all supply chains have integrated traceability and commitment of suppliers to traceability, especially the global suppliers.

This leads to the need to start measuring and improving on the metrics of

Percentage of Product in compliance, which is the percentage of product produced, that is in compliance to processes against total products is greater than 98 percent.
First Pass Yield, which is the share of finished product that goes through the process the first time without defects, is greater than 95 percent.
Response time to non-conforming shipments, which is product discovered to be out of compliance and the average time needed to locate and quarantined is less than one hour.
On-Time delivery, which is the ration of product delivered on-time (not early or late) to the total product delivered is greater than 95 percent.

Benchmark and improve performance in these key categories, which include

Process – through the standardization of processes across the organization.
Organization – through establishing ownership of executive management for the traceability and risk mitigation initiatives.
Knowledge Management – through delivery of process and system data into information that is turned into actionable intelligence for quicker decision making. Action intelligence is defined as delivering the right data to the right person in a usable format in real time so appropriate actions (decisions/judgments) are taken with a minimum of intermediaries or pushing the decision-making process down to the lowest level (establishing intent).
Technology – through exploiting technology that supports and drives compliance and traceability programs.
Performance Management – through abilities to measure business performance that drives continuous improvements proactively.

Traceability and genealogy programs are supported by QMS, SCM, CRM, and ERP systems. It is the use and exploitation of these tools that improve the visibility and functionality of processes and systems. This drives accessibility to relevant employees in real time – eliminating lag time – which increases responsiveness and focus on working on the right activities. The effectiveness of the structures implemented will be based on the existing technology. The benefit of continuous improvement programs will be aided by new technology adoption and integration into QMS, SCM, and CRM systems.