We need to talk about IT/IM departments building their own software. We encounter that phenomenon regularly and we do have some questions about it.
Justified customization
Building yourself is well justified when it comes to software that 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 custom software that you can build yourself or have built by yourself. We can be brief about this: logical and totally fine.
The do-it-yourself overachiever
It gets weird in our eyes when an IT/IM department starts developing applications that actually already exist. As if you are going to build your own Microsoft Excel lookalike because you run into the limitations of Excel as an accounting program. You know there are dozens of great accounting applications out there, yet you go build your own Excel accounting lookalike. Why?
We are of the management software for quality and risk management. Sometimes we hear from a quality manager, "We built our own quality management system." That could possibly be a choice if you have a very particular primary process to which no existing QMS fits. But that is almost never the case.
Why put scarce IT/IM capacity and money into a secondary process like quality management? Doesn't an IT/IM department that does that have anything better to do? Or do they think they can do it better than the specialists who are busy day and night developing their state-of-the-art QMSs, which come in all kinds of forms and specializations?
The knot-all-together-elevator
What also occurs alongside complete self-build and rebuilds is a motley hodgepodge of existing applications, tweaked and tied together at will. The reason for this kind of practice is that there are often running licenses of software, which, with a little artifice, you can also use a-sort-of for quality management.
A folder structure in Teams is then the manual and on Sharepoint are some links for registrations. Those registrations themselves are done via Web forms that land an e-mail in the Quality Department's inbox. The emails are retyped into Excel and uploaded into Power BI once a month for up-to-date management information. Follow-up on the registrations is done manually, because of course those webforms don't automatically trigger all sorts of workflows and tasks. And after a software update of one component, the whole system falls over because the links suddenly stop working.
Not taken seriously
A company that does not want to invest in a QMS is basically saying to its quality manager: "Sure, quality management is all well and good, but of course we're not going to invest in it. Just work with the tools we already have. Good luck!"
In our opinion, a good QHSE/KAM manager deserves a full QMS. For the price of one month's salary, you can - in the case of ISO2HANDLE - have an entire year's worth of a powerful and versatile QMS that 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 identification and control so that your business 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 no-obligation online demo, we would be happy to show you what we mean. We will also gladly provide you with the positive arguments that you can use in-company. QHSE/KAM manager, take your job and yourself seriously and schedule that demo soon. What have you got to lose?
