NederlandsThe Quality Online's approach to achieving Lean Governance transforms IT from a perennial obstacle into a dynamic enabler of change, innovation and Business Excellence. Quality Online process management applications and our fit-to-organisation implementations provide the tools to increase your organisation's speed of learning and ability to adapt.
More than a decade of EPM implementations has resulted in Quality Online's Consistency Model, which helps us to fit applications to our clients' strategic and operational goals. We bring together our clients' key team of dynamic managers and experienced knowledge workers. Collaborating with this group we innovate process form from within the organisation mapping internal policies, externally-driven obligations, controls, and assessment issues to business processes.
Just a Few Examples...
Quality Online has realised Lean Governance in different projects: the stunning simplicity of Dutch Rail's organisation-wide Incident Management system (Alert); NedTrain's use of a Quality Online application as a strategic pillar of its corporate bottom-up innovation initiative 'My Idea'; and, KLM's implementation of a single global audit management system (Q-Blue).
Learning Enterprises
Aligning processes with organisational goals and supporting them with IT is only one half of the story. While streamlining and intelligently automating processes produces sometimes dramatically decreased costs and increased efficiency, the reduction of complexity, errors, and wasted time (in the form of inefficient searching, waiting, work duplication and other misdirected communications and activities) is not enough. Releasing knowledge workers from mundane administrative tasks frees unused potential that can significantly improve content quality and enterprise performance.
A good case in point for the dramatic results that can be obtained by tapping into unused insights are well illustrated in NedTrain's 'My Idea' project. It generated more than 1800 innovation proposals in the first 12 months. Of these, more than 400 were implemented. At its height, employee participation topped out at 20%, and the project enjoys continued popularity both with management and the workforce.
Lean organisations
Lean organisations are focused on adding value for customers, as the Nedtrain example shows. In practise, client-centric service means that inputs for service innovation will most often come from front-line, or service workers. Quality Online's EPM applications allow these users to custom design for local conditions and initiatives as a way of siting these potential sources of innovation. To leverage this business-critical information, organisations also need to have procedures and an open culture for converting effective front-line service innovations into organisational best practise.
Quality Online solutions support rapid and ongoing sharing of proficiencies throughout organisations by centralising knowledge and making it available as a utility service. When best practises and proficiencies become general knowledge throughout the enterprise, further innovation can proceed from the leading edge of the organisation's knowledge. Improved informational flow is the foundation for building a learning enterprise with a corporate ethos of collaborating and co-creating ideas, proficiencies and products.
From Closed Loop to Mobius Strip: Continuous Compliance
Lean Governance helps organisations improve performance while remaining compliant through top-down process innovation within an automated compliance framework. Quality Online solutions establish mutually supporting processes that empower your workforce locally, while providing oversight globally. Embedding compliance in processes makes it easier for dispersed business units to remain compliant, while improved information access and flow stimulates innovation and makes compliance easier to monitor.
A good example of an organisation working in widely-dispersed teams, but still operating in alignment with centrally-managed policies, is Quality Online's international implementation for Vopak Peru.
Quality Online's applications provide scope for continuous process monitoring, and automated gathering of metrics that allow notifications to be keyed to performance reporting. This is the ideal basis for identifying trends, revealing compliance and safety issues, and for supporting data-driven decision making-- which in turn can improve response time and qualitatively better resolutions.
Quality Online enables organisations to achieve a 'mobius strip' of continuously compliant process and service improvements through periodic process review and openness to front-line insights and innovations.