It’s all about consistency and visibility
Achieving this consistency can seem daunting. By their very nature, mergers and acquisitions bring two companies together, which means at least two sets of processes, products and quality control practices – and that’s before tackling the layers of disparate technology that may be in place. It is not practical or cost effective to impose a single standard across a newly formed company either by ripping out and replacing all your equipment or via expensive hardware and/or software upgrades for all of your different product lines, facilities and supply chain vendors.Big data, small changes
It may be tempting to dismiss data and quality reporting to the realms of the IT department and quality managers, but it is as essential for the management team as it is for those on the shop floor assembling products. If those inconsistencies result in wasted time or poor product quality, they will impact the company’s bottom line. As such, it is in the management team’s best interest to implement standard procedures and reporting – even at the shop floor level – to ensure they can easily analyse and compare performance and quality across lines, departments or plants.Quality in action
We recently worked with a snack foods company with an existing quality hub. The company had recently acquired a new production plant and its employees viewed the company’s centralised system with a fair amount of scepticism. To combat this, the company invited its new employees to its main plant so they could see first-hand the quality hub in action. Upon seeing how much time the software saved and how much easier their jobs could be, they embraced the change in process. The company ultimately saved more than $1m in product waste in its first year and to reduce customer complaints by 30 per cent, proving that small changes can make a big difference. At the best of times, growing businesses can become victims of their own success. The implementation of various tools, techniques and processes over time can easily produce confusion and inconsistencies. This ‘data chaos’ is magnified after a merger or acquisition and can leave a new business even more vulnerable when all eyes are on its performance and products. Bringing order to this chaos can be effectively managed by centralising data and making it visible across the new organisation, giving everyone from the CEO to a production line manager visibility into the products being created – ensuring they live up to the standards consumers have come to expect. Rick Sloop is part of the Technical Services team at InfinityQS.Share this story