During my years of experience helping companies with quality, I’ve observed that in some, any conversation and initiatives related to quality seem to revolve around operations. In manufacturing companies, this tends to be the actual production plant or factory; in service companies, it’s their core operations and customer service areas.

Proof of this limiting mindset is the fact that, in some companies, the quality head reports to the operations head. In other words, the quality department is a subset of operations. In my experience, this immediately prevents, or at least limits, quality from spreading to areas other than operations.

Nobody can deny that operations is an important area for focus on quality initiatives. However, by restricting quality focus only to operations, are some organizations failing to get the full benefits that their quality programs potentially offer?

Isn’t quality—which includes standardized processes, customer focus, efficiency, waste consciousness, performance measurement, and continuous improvement—applicable to sales to HR to admin to (of all things) innovation?

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