Do your own jobs or opt for professionalism?
We need to talk about IT/IM departments that build their own software. We encounter this phenomenon regularly and we do have some questions about it.
Justified customization
Building it yourself is quite justifiable when it comes to software, which serves as a control application for a self-designed production machine. There is no standard software for such a thing. So you have to rely on customization that you can build yourself or have it built. We can be brief about this: logical and completely fine.
The DIY dunny overlord
In our eyes, it gets strange when a department starts developing IT/IM applications that have actually been around for a long time. It's like building your own Microsoft Excel lookalike because you're running into the limitations of Excel as an accounting program. You know that there are dozens of fantastic accounting applications, but you are still going to build an Excel accounting variant yourself. Why?
We are the management software for quality and risk management. Sometimes we hear from a quality manager: “We've built our own quality management system.” This may be a choice if you have a very special primary process, where no existing QMS fits. But that is almost never the case.
Why are you using scarce IT/IM capacity and money on a secondary process such as quality management? Does an IT/IM department that does that have nothing better to do? Or do they think they can do better than the specialists who spend the day and night developing their state-of-the-art QMSs, which are available in various forms and specializations?
The tie everything together
In addition to complete self-construction and reconstruction, what also occurs is a colorful mix of existing applications, which are tweaked and linked at will. The reason for this kind of practice is that there are often current licenses for software, which, with a little effort, you can also use for quality management.
A folder structure in Teams is then the handbook and there are some links for registrations on Sharepoint. The registrations themselves take place via web forms that land an email in the Quality Department's inbox. The emails are retyped into Excel and uploaded to Power BI once a month for up-to-date management information. The follow-up of the registrations is done manually, because, of course, those webforms do not automatically initiate all kinds of workflows and tasks. And after a software update of one component, the entire system collapses because the links suddenly stop working.
Not taken seriously
A company that does not want to invest in a QMS actually tells its quality manager: “Hey, all good and nice, quality management, but of course we're not going to invest in that. Just enjoy working with the tools we already have at home. Good luck!”
In our opinion, a good QHSE/KAM manager deserves a full-fledged QMS. For the price of one monthly salary, you can - in the case of ISO2HANDLE - have a powerful and versatile QMS for a whole year, which can give your organization a quality boost from here to Tokyo. With that system, you can start working on continuous improvement of your organization and on risk assessment and control so that your company becomes stronger. The system automates all the underlying manual work, allowing you, as a quality manager, to focus on the essence of your job; managing quality and risk in your organization.
In a free online demo, we'd love to show you what we mean. We are also happy to provide you with the positive arguments with which you can farm in-company. QHSE/KAM manager, take your work and yourself seriously and schedule that demo quickly. What do you have to lose?
