Quality: Trust in a World of Change

Here at Technoprint we pride ourselves on our culture of quality; as the quote goes “Quality products and quality service first begin with quality thinking”. Making quality a culture is not something that happened overnight and has taken a lot of hard work, but it allows us to maintain the high levels of quality that our customers have come to expect from us.

Quality is embedded in to all our processes and decisions, however the letters that make up the word ‘Quality’, can also be used to list some of the main aspects of our quality culture:

Question

Understand

Assurance

Line Clearance

Integrity

Training

You

Question

In order to identify the true root cause of issues we ask why 5 times. Properly understanding why something went wrong then allows us to put a suitable corrective action in place to prevent reoccurrence.

We also question why we do things – is the current way really the most efficient way, is it a requirement of the standards etc? Just because something has always been done that way doesn’t mean it is the best or right way!

Understand

In order to ensure we provide what our customer is expecting, we need to fully understand what they require from us so specifications are key to defining the products to be supplied.

It is also important that our staff fully understand what quality is and why it is so important. Having staff buy in greatly increases the probability of a successful quality culture.

Assurance

Quality assurance is key to ensuring the leaflets we produce are “fit for purpose” and that things are done “right first time”. All our staff are aware of the quality quote, “If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?”.

Line clearance

Mix up prevention is one of the biggest concerns we have and line clearance is one of our most important processes in preventing this. All staff are subject to line clearance training at induction and each year during annual refresher training. Although we have camera inspection systems on all our finishing lines to prevent a rogue leaflet passing through the line, carrying out a verified line clearance at start ensures that we are not reliant upon this security system.

Integrity

Our customers can rely on us to conduct our business with integrity; the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles is just as important to us as the quality of our leaflets.

Data integrity is another important integrity that our staff fully understand. We want to ensure that when our customers come to visit us we can show them data that is reliable and accurate. Our staff understand that data must be recorded in real time, by the person collecting the data/performing the check, and that it must be legible.

Training

Training is a big part of life at Technoprint and is never ending as we are always developing the skills of our staff and ensuring they keep up to date with current technologies and knowledge. Embedding quality into an operators culture begins on their very first day when they are given a detailed induction training which includes an introduction to GMP, reading of procedures and SOPS and line clearance and mix up prevention training.

You

One of the most important things we communicate to our staff is that quality begins with you; as W. Edwards Deming said, “Quality is everyone’s responsibility”. Displayed in our office is a poster stating ‘Quality is in our hands’ and every member of Technoprint has placed their handprint on this and signed to show their commitment to it.

Last November we celebrated ‘World Quality Day’ and as part of this, we asked our staff to create some quality posters which reflected what quality means to them. The posters that were produced showed a real depth to peoples understanding and ownership of quality (these posters can be seen here https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6334416753254240256)

Keep a look out for what ideas we have to celebrate this years World Quality Day #WQD18. The theme ‘Quality: Trust in a World of Change’  is around celebrating the role that everyone in an organisation plays in building and sustaining trust for all stakeholders: customers, suppliers, staff, regulators, shareholders and society.