The daily life of a Quality Manager is busy but very diversified. As its name suggests, it ensures quality at different levels in the company. They must know both how the company works and how each department operates, while having excellent interpersonal skills. Now how is a typical day of a Quality Manager organized?
We will follow Jean-Michel, a Quality Manager of a manufacturing plant, in his daily work.
7:20 am: On the way to the factory
Jean-Michel is stuck in a traffic jam. He lives in the city and the company is located in the countryside, outside the city. He takes the opportunity to listen to the radio: there are traffic jams on the northern ring road, he may be late.
08:10 am: Checking e-mails
Jean-Michel greets Christine at the reception desk, he is actually only ten minutes late.
He settles at his desk and takes the time to check his emails.
Oops the management review... Jean-Michel knows that if he had had the opportunity to have an email reminder informing him of the meeting, he could have managed to complete these technical sheets before this afternoon.
If only the company could have a workflow system that would allow it to generate email alerts for the actions to be settled. Wouldn't it also be nice to have a powerful document management tool to share documents with all employees?
08H40 am: Visit in the Production Department
No time to read all his emails, Jean-Michel is called to go to the factory.
There is a problem with one of the production lines which has therefore been blocked during the repair by maintenance.
Jean-Michel notes that the non-conformity sheet was not written because the operator did not have the paper sheet available. He imagines a tablet form that could be used in the field without having to go through paper. With a simple click, he would generate a report that will be sent directly to his mailbox.
As a QM, he takes the opportunity to communicate with operators and remind them of good practices to adopt in such situations. Because the role of a Quality Specialist is to communicate, above all: he must not make value judgments or adopt a factual language.
Jean-Michel runs into Benoît and takes the opportunity to provide him with a list of the actions he has to settle.
He shares with him the idea of integrating a shared EDM within the company, as well as tablets in the field. Benoît is excited about the idea, but wonders if his team could agree to use computer tools.
Recommended for you. Download the free graphic design: “EHSQ digitization: what is it?”
11:05 am: Preparation for the management review
Visiting the production department took longer than expected, but it was necessary.
Jean-Michel sits in his office to finish writing Marie’s technical sheets for the Management review meeting. He takes the opportunity to check that all department heads have settled their actions in the action plan. At the same time, he notes that Benoît did indeed update his actions in the plan... but he’s overwritten the old Excel version containing the last update that Jean-Michel had made three days ago.
If only EDM were better organized! There would have been no transcription issues! Once the error has been rectified, statistics and quality indicators must be prepared.
Jean-Michel tries to keep an Excel file with several diagrams up to date, but it is not easy to manage this alone when the production does not have access to the documents... He then imagines a tool that would allow him to share all the information in real time in the field, and then generate an automatic statistics report. No more time spent trying to retrieve information from left to right!
02:00 pm: Launch of the management review
The meeting is starting, all the departments were present and so was the General Manager. As always, the overall action plan is reviewed in its entirety to verify the actions that were closed out during the month.
But as always, the Director is annoyed by the typos in the Excel document. Jean-Michel then mentioned the possible implementation of a digitized action plan that would allow everyone to follow their daily actions. The Director listens carefully and notes to come back to this idea in the future. He did not know that it was possible to manage an action plan in this way.
Then comes the subject of the preparation of the ISO 9001 follow-up audit. This subject is of great concern to the Director because the deadline is near and there are still many actions to be implemented. He asks that an internal self-assessment be conducted in the coming weeks to verify the institution's compliance with the standard. Jean-Michel bites his nails because he already knows that the task will be tedious... He plans to start working on it at the end of the day.
It is now the maintenance turn to intervene on the incident that took place that very morning. The General Manager is outraged by the management of the machine pool. According to him, if the monitoring and maintenance of the equipment were better organized, this incident would not have occurred.
Alexandre, Maintenance Manager, argues that he does not have the necessary tools to better manage his CMMS. Jean-Michel thinks again about his tool on a tablet and imagines forms specially designed for CMMS that would make it possible to monitor the maintenance of various machines. The forms could include pictures, as well as all the technical information of the different machines.
The management review ends with a review of the figures from recent weeks, the company is still doing fine and that is the main thing.
Recommended for you. Download the free graphic design: “EHSQ digitization: what is it?”
04:45 pm : Daily tasks management
The management review is over, Jean-Michel finally settles down to carry out his daily tasks. Jean-Michel is forward-looking and started to draft the procedure to be initiated for the internal self-assessment that will take place soon. He knows in advance that he will have to gather all the documents related to the standard and that it will take him a long time.
If he had had an IT tool dedicated to the management of certifications, he could have gathered all the evidence related to ISO 9001 on the same tab and with that managed his self-assessment with no difficulties.
6:40 pm: It's time to go home
Jean-Michel has tired eyes. He must not dawdle on this because tonight is his daughter's show and he absolutely doesn't want to miss it.
This day made him think a lot: it's settled, he will try to implement a digital tool within his establishment!
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Mélanie CASCELLI
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