Consider customer focus for business continuity

What comes to mind when you hear of coffee grown and processed in Kenya, clothes made in Turkey or cars made in Germany? Certainly, it is quality of the product or service.

Quality can be described as the degree of excellence. From improving processes, systems, products and services to making sure that the whole organisation is fit and effective, managing quality effectively enhances an organisation’s potential for success.

Quality is central to a country’s brand and reputation. It protects organisations against risks, increases their efficiency, boosts their profits, and makes them sustainable.

Failures in quality resulting from poor governance, ineffective assurance and resistance to change hurt businesses. Many will remember the reputational crises endured by BP, resulting from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill of 2010, and VW emission cheating scandal of 2015.

Quality is not just about disaster prevention but about achieving great results. It is important to match one's services and products to the needs of their customer to remain relevant in business.

For products, customers look for performance, durability, reliability, conformance, serviceability, aesthetics, safety and after sales service. For services, they expect timeliness, consistency, courtesy, accessibility, responsiveness, convenience, completeness, and accuracy, among others.

The adoption of ISO 9001: Quality Management Systems (QMS) therefore should be a strategic decision to ensure delivery of service or product that meets customer requirements.

We should continually put a spotlight on the first principle of QMS: customer focus. Although an organisation or business has many stakeholders, customers are the most important. Customer focus is a responsibility of all employees.

The other principles of QMS are leadership, employee engagement, process approach, continuous improvement, evidence-based decision making and relationship management.

Data shows that countries with the highest QMS certifications have positive reputation, thus creating confidence in their products, resulting in higher sales and economic growth.

According to the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO), the leading three countries with QMS certifications in the world are China (280,386), Italy (95,812) and Germany (47,868). In Africa, South Africa leads the pack with 3,464, Egypt with 2,271 while Kenya has only 442.

Locally, the initial uptake of QMS by the public sector was through Performance Contract Target requirements. Today, both the private and public sector implement QMS.

Notable public sector organisations include National Social Security Fund while the private sector is led by Safaricom. Makueni County has initiated training.

To promote quality management competence, Kebs in collaboration with Kasneb is at the initial stages of developing a professional certification for quality practitioners, the first of its kind in the region.

Cecilia Mutuku is the Head of the National Quality Institute, Kenya Bureau of Standards.