All social businesses need a quality system outlining all that’s required to deliver a quality assured product or service.
A quality system usually consists of various business processes aligned with your social purpose which aim to enhance customer satisfaction.
What are quality standards?
Quality assured means that it’s guaranteed to meet the needs of the customer. Social business might also need to ensure it meets the needs of the community, as well as corporate policies such as locally sourced or fairly traded. Whatever the various measures, step one is to make a set of standards which the product or service needs to meet.
The importance of quality management systems
When considering a quality system, start by asking ‘What do we actually do?’ and ‘To what standard should we do it?’. Work to a set of standards which ensure that the final product is 'fit for use' (including safe and legally compliant) as opposed to 'best possible'. The latter is unhelpful, hard to define or achieve, and may lead to low volumes of delivery at high cost, making further delivery at any standard unlikely.
Finding the right quality system for your social enterprise
Once you’ve established the quality standards for the final product, work back along the processes of delivery, production, sub-contracting and sourcing to set standards along the links of the chain. Then, define how to measure actual performance against those standards. Consider also how to make it predictable that these will be met through tools such as record keeping, monitoring, precise processes, equipment, supply contracts, training and support for workers. The collated information forms your quality manual.
How to implement quality standards
Quality manuals may be entirely for internal use. They may also aim to demonstrate conformity to an quality regime to an outside agency conformity. For example, it may conform to the care industry standards or to a general standard, such as those awarded by the International Organisation for Standards (ISO). These demonstrate that an organisation takes quality seriously and works to meet its quality standards for products or services in an organised, recorded and auditable way.
External accreditation may be essential for operation in some trades. It demonstrates to important customers that they will get a service that is fit for use or meets the requirements of their own quality systems.
The cost of registration and ongoing external monitoring are likely to be significant and need to be included in the cost of production. Social businesses in particular should look at ISO 9001 (Quality), ISO 14001 (Environmental Management) and ISO 26001 (Social Responsibility) on the ISO website.
How to create a quality manual
Quality manuals may be written internally or by outside experts with experience in writing quality manuals. The latter may be more economic, but it is important that those working in the social business are actively engaged in learning the process and contribute to it. Otherwise the quality manual will become a document written by an outsider for outsiders.
If you retain the intellectual and implementable ownership, the quality manual will become a living document, amended and enhanced every time you identify the reason for an error or omission and trace it back to a missing step, lack of clarity or failure in monitoring.
Continual improvement
To maximise the likelihood of this continuous improvement taking place, there should be procedures for noting and reporting problems as they occur. You should also encourage those closest to the process to make recommendations for improvement.
Note that continuous improvement does not necessarily refer to the continuous improvement of the product, though part of a good quality system refers to how to check that the end user really does find the service or product fit for use (and if not why not). Continuous improvement might also mean reduction of wastage of time or material, simplification of process or reduction of risk.
Organisations across the private, public and the third sectors can turn to the Wales Quality Centre for support.
Once you have developed appropriate and affordable quality systems, look into the financial control of your social business.