Qualityworld

Celebrate quality

Held in November every year,World Quality Day provides a great opportunity to celebrate quality. Helen Stokes explains how you can get involved

World Quality Day was established by the United Nations in 1990 to raise international awareness of the important role quality has to play in business. It is celebrated on the second Thursday in November each year. It also coincides with European Quality Week and provides a chance for quality professionals and organisations around the world to celebrate their achievements, raise awareness of quality approaches and show how they make a tangible impact on businesses striving to achieve excellence.

Why celebrate World Quality Day?

There are many reasons for signing up to the World Quality Day ethos and celebrating the day with an event, contest or information sharing event. You might use the day to:

celebrate the work the people in your organisation do to achieve quality
demonstrate your commitment to your customers
reward outstanding suppliers for their contribution to your success
place quality at the top of the boardroom agenda
reinforce the quality message throughout your company and beyond

A good place to start is by raising awareness of the importance of quality to your organisation internally. Making staff aware of what quality means to your organisation and customers and how they contribute to achieving success is key. This can be achieved through newsletters, customer open days or staff events

Neil Peattie, engineering quality and drawing office manager at ESL Defence organised a quiz for staff at his company based around Deming's famous points.

'World Quality Day is an opportunity to demonstrate how quality affects our daily lives'

He notes: 'World Quality Day is an opportunity to demonstrate how quality affects our daily lives. For example, our new lean six sigma programme can be linked to many of Deming's 14 points.'

Some businesses consider World Quality Day to be the ideal opportunity to promote their latest quality campaign to staff. If you are planning an entirely new initiative, World Quality Day could provide the ideal opportunity to get things moving. So if the environment is your key focus for the next year and you plan to work towards ISO 14001, why not make a start here?

Equally, if you are already working towards ISO 9001 certification or implementing a six sigma project, this could be an ideal way to showcase the benefits to your company and get that vital buy-in, just like Ian Footitt of Capricorn Auto.

He said: 'This is a big year for us as far as quality is concerned.We are going for ISO 9001 certification, so quality is the buzz-word for us at the moment. We will be using World Quality Day to reiterate the importance of quality and quality tools in our business.'

'World Quality Day is a mechanism to promote your commitment to quality'

Externally,World Quality Day provides a mechanism for you to promote your commitment to quality achievements to customers, suppliers and other stakeholders. You might consider inviting some of your key suppliers to visit your organisation and then hold a seminar in which you discuss the importance of the role of quality in your relationship and how by employing quality processes both sides can benefit on the bottom line.

World Quality Day could also provide the launch pad for the process towards entering a quality award. There are a host of regional quality awards around the UK – such as the Midlands Excellence awards or the Wales Quality Award. You could benchmark your company nationally and enter the British Quality Foundation's excellence awards or the London Excellence awards, and in the US there is the opportunity to compete for the Baldrige Award. You could even create your own awards to motivate and publicly acknowledge your staff!

A quality future

Whatever path you take to promote quality within your company,World Quality Day provides a good starting point. People are key to success, and involving your staff could help you on the way to a major head-start on your quality journey. Quality is everyone's responsibility but adopting approaches and tools requires competent quality professionals. World Quality Day may also provide an opportunity to encourage your staff to consider qualifications and training in quality or even becoming a member of the CQI.

And finally, remember companies of all sizes can participate in World Quality Day with activities to suit your staff and your sector.

GB Welding Services is a small fabricator company employing around 15 staff in Rutland. In 2007, staff supplied quality information packs to customers and increased their own levels of knowledge.

'World Quality Day has raised awareness internally of the need for quality'

GB Welding's quality manager, Adrian Salt said: 'World Quality Day has raised awareness internally of the need of quality and how it affects all of us on a daily basis.'

Over at Ruston Electronics, an electronics company of 65 people based near Luton, the team also used World Quality Day to promote internal awareness of quality.

Mel Edwards, business improvement manager, said: 'Our World Quality Day initiative was the start of our business improvement training for all staff. I decided to purchase tins of Quality Street to raise awareness of this day and the link to quality via our improvement programme.'

Raising awareness

Where to start?

communicate internally – start raising awareness by talking to colleagues
get early buy-in and active support from senior managers
register your involvement with CQI to receive regular updates at www.worldqualityday.org

Promotion

put up posters and other display material
promote via your intranet, email signatures, website, newsletters, screensavers and stationery
put up a display in reception
issue press releases to local news media
invite other teams to lunch to enable them to ask and learn about quality

Competition

host a 'quality' quiz
create a quality puzzle, ie crossword, word search
hold an acronym competition
run a series of forums and information events, eg top ten quality tools
display a 'roll of honour' for those with CQI membership, six sigma green and black belts, or other qualifications in quality
staff nominations for those they feel are quality champions

And remember...

choose events and activities to suit your organisation
visit www.worldqualityday.org for tips, information, materials and logo
take photos and send them in with details of your quality celebrations to the website to share your ideas

How you celebrated World Quality Day

ESL Defence

We celebrated World Quality Day with a company-wide contest. Each employee was forwarded a list of quality-related tenets derived from quality guru W Edwards Deming's famous 14 points for quality management.

Employees were asked to identify which of the listed points was not Deming's. One prize-winner was drawn from among those who correctly identified which item did not belong on the list.

Engineering quality and drawing office manager Neil Peattie presented the lucky winner, Ray Bishop of ESL's production department, with a bagful of prizes from the CQI.

A news story regarding World Quality Day was included in an issue of INK.com, our companywide electronic newsletter with news from across the business.

Neil Peattie is engineering, quality and drawing office manager at ESL Defence

Micronas Limited

World Quality Day 2007 enabled us to promote quality internally within the company. We edited the CQI poster to include our company name, logo and key projects and posted it around the factory and displayed it on our plasma screen.

The poster, CQI World Quality Day globe image and a short description of World Quality Day and European Quality Week were posted on our global intranet page.

The CQI promotional pack was presented by the MD to an employee who throughout the year had demonstrated a high degree of commitment to quality.

This presentation was photographed and a small article included in the next issue of our global employee magazine.

John Lawson is a quality assurance engineer at Micronas