How to leverage Quality KPIs

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When setting up your quality management system, it is important to establish how you will measure success. If you do not have set parameters in mind, you will not be able to tell if you are doing well or falling behind. KPIs, or key performance indicators, are how you measure the success of your quality system so you can grow, track your progress, and make adjustments when you get off track.

Once you have established your quality goals, and objectives, you will need to establish ways to measure these goals and track your progress and growth. Different businesses will have different goals and therefore different key performance indicators. Even within the same industry, two competing companies may choose to track their success using different indicators depending on their goals and plans for the future.

Choosing KPIs that Matter

When choosing key performance indicators it is important to think long term. If your methods for measuring success are constantly changing then you will have a hard time tracking your businesses success over the long run and may not identify problems before they arise.

uniPoint offers over 600 pre-loaded KPI Quality metrics spanning all of our functional quality modules. The metrics can be simple text based KPI’s, graphs or charts. When you hover your mouse over the KPI it gives you a full description of how the KPI is calculated. When you click on the specific KPI, it returns a list of all the quality records. So, for example, the KPI for Past Due Calibration may show the number 10 in RED. This means there are 10 past due calibrations, and by clicking on that KPI, it will show you a list of the 10 past due maintenance tickets. By double clicking on any of the 10 maintenance tickets in question, you can drill right back to the specific ticket and take action.

So the KPI’s form the details of a customizable executive dashboard, which each user of uniPoint can setup differently. The dashboard gives each user a quality view from 30,000 feet, with an understanding as to the health of the entire quality system at a glance. All past due activity is shown in red. This means you can prove to your customers or auditors that your quality system is up-to-date and in-compliance at any time – even before the Audit begins!

By double clicking on each metric, you can also leverage your KPI’s for record navigation and action steps. So you are always one mouse click away from understanding a problem and being able to launch and email reminder to the assigned user to take action.

Leveraging KPI’s is central to quality management and continual improvement. That is why uniPoint pre-loads them, and provides you with an environment that promotes collaboration, accountability and automation.