World Quality Week 2023 - Recognising Your Competitive Potential

World Quality Week is a global event that emerged from the foundation of World Quality Day, way back in 1969 by the Chartered Quality Institute (CQI) in the UK. Its objective continues to emphasise the significance of quality management across different industries across all continents, through the sharing of expertise and ideas, which ultimately contribute to the betterment of products, services, and processes.

World Quality week is an opportunity for organisations (and more importantly, quality management professionals) to unite, exchange and share best practices and knowledge related to quality. This fosters a culture of continuous improvement and ensures that quality remains a central focus in all aspects of operational performance.

This year's focus theme is: “QUALITY: realising your competitive potential”.

Recognising and maintaining an organisation’s competitive advantage, “requires more than just operational resilience” (CQI), it requires the ability to continually improve and quickly deal with negative actions, which may hinder the organisation’s ability to satisfy customers’ needs and expectations, over an above their competitors’ products or services.

Cliff Smith (Executive Director) from the UK construction consortium Get it Right Initiative (GIRI) published a paper (05 Jan 2022), speculating productivity in Construction is severely impacted by avoidable errors, proposing the cost of rework to be in the vicinity of 21% of a project value. A paper published by Peter E.D. Love, Jim Smith, Fran Ackermann and Zahir (20 August 2018), titled “Making sense of rework and its unintended consequence in projects: The emergence of uncomfortable knowledge”, concluded that the ability to “Get it Right the first time” is “central to acquiring productivity and performance improvement in construction”.

With the cost of construction spiralling and margins already tight, organisations need to find better, more efficient methods to maintain market share and profitability. By investing in a culture of quality and capability, construction companies have the ability to “achieve productive processes”, minimise re-work and provide their customers with quality products and services. Engaging with Quality Professionals at critical stages of design and delivery process, will mitigate risk and provide opportunity for successful outcomes, that not only leads to customer satisfaction, but also improved reputational standing and industry competitive advantage.