Task
We were engaged by a major UK Airport to help their Airside division implement a Continuous Improvement (CI) program. While a number of improvement projects were successfully delivered by their trained Green and Black Belts over an 18 month period, we diagnosed that the projects were taking longer than we would expect due to the lack of some of the fundamental documentation and mapping of existing processes in the operation including the lack of structured management review process.
We worked with the Management Team, who by now had become fully engaged in the CI program, to set up a Quality Management System (QMS) program which would aim to establish those foundations in the business which would enable the CI projects to be done with much more ease and speed. The other key imperative was that the operation needed to implement a Safety Management System (SMS) to comply with regulation.
Action
Implementing a QMS involved first conducting a thorough Gap Analysis with respect to the ISO9001:2015 Standard. Once this exercise was completed, an Implementation plan was put in place with full buy-in from the Management team to implement the key cornerstones of the QMS: Understanding needs and expectations of key stakeholders, developing plans and objectives, developing resource plans, mapping of the core and support processes, implementing process performance review and then to complete the PDCA cycle, a robust Corrective and Preventive Action Planning (CAPA) process..
Services Provided
- Continuous improvement program
- Quality Management System (QMS)
- Gap Analysis of processes
- Organizational Effectiveness
Result
We exploited the synergies between the QMS and the SMS systems and the teams implemented the new processes with the right rigour.
As part of building capability in the teams, we conducted several masterclasses on QMS and SMS and conducted detailed QMS methodology training for their Champions.
Selected individuals were also taken through QMS Internal Auditor course and the whole internal audit cycle was successfully completed.
The organisation was recognised by the regulators for its efforts towards implementing a robust SMS and based on the success of the QMS program in the division, the Executive Board decided to kick off organisation wide implementing of a management system on the lines of the QMS.
