How to take the plunge on an eQMS- build consensus across the company
Denis Machoka shares Harmonic Bionics' collaborative approach to choosing an eQMS. The team collectively identified and categorized desired system attributes, ensuring the chosen system reflected the team's consensus. This method involved engaging with vendors that met their defined criteria.
Transcript

00:00 - 00:11
I think in terms of the system, one of the things that we did at Harmonic Bionics that really helped the organization was we did this as a team.



00:11 - 00:34
I took myself out of the picture as an executive and kind of let the team make a decision on what an ideal system would be. We literally had meetings where we said, what would be our best quality system? What does it need to be in, needs to have all these attributes and we put them on the board and we also said what attributes we must have good to have, must have, could be great, and all those things.



00:34 - 00:54
And then we went around and found all the quality systems that fit those criteria. As one of them, we had to be online. It had to be less i.t intuitive, you know, I can go on and on and I'm sure I would attest to this. There's a lot of things that we put together in ideas that we wanted to have with our colleagues system.



00:54 - 01:27
Once we did that, we started interviewing all of the vendors that fit that criteria and every vendor we fit that criteria. We had a mark on what we did and how they fit that criteria. When we came to Unifize checked out all the criteria, and so we bought new intuitive leave without. After about a few minutes of talking to the CEO we knew that we were on to something.



01:27 - 01:47
So it became a question of, you know, you have the right product, but are you willing to jump? And that's usually where most people get stuck, right? You intuitively know this is the right tool, but now you have to go and sell to the executive, to my CEO, that this is the right tool and this is why I think it's the right tool.



01:47 - 02:09
And my CEO, Chris Prentice, came up and gave me a mandate and said, I trust you, which is a big, big vote. I trust that you will make the best decisions for this organization. And that's exactly what I said I took and I took upon myself to make that decision. And one of the trainings we've had in Six Sigma transformational.



02:09 - 02:32
When you know something is right, it's right regardless of base. And knowing that you can have that no one can explain. And that comes from intuition, knowledge, experience. And sometimes you just know this is the right tool and you may not have all the understanding of it, but it just feels correctly because it checks all the information that you needed.



02:32 - 02:53
So the rest is just fear. And I think some of us get paralyzed with that. We want to jump, but how do we know? Then we start talking ourselves out of it. But once we jumped and the decision was jump, it was probably the best jump because the landing was so soft. We looked around and say, Did we miss anything?



02:54 - 03:16
And that's where you want to be, is you want to jump while knowing very well that there's a very good chance that it's going to work because the landing is going to be soft anyway. We had that experience and everybody at Harmonic Bionics really likes Unifize, and there were several members of the organization that are singing praises to Unifize at the moment.



03:16 - 03:21
So we have no regrets and I'm very happy with the product.

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Transcript

But what we've known from what I experience was, is we were able to get there with the system. We still there with the system. The system has what is needed to provide us what we're looking for, because every company, admittedly, is trying to get compliant. If we educate people, if we get people the education that they need and to get over the fear factor, I think 90% of those things can be resolved because most people will go to what they're most familiar with.What I worked with from a different company, but they're not willing to sit down and look at what the demographics are saying. People are into social media now. People are moving fast into fast paced world. But technologies are still antiquated. So there's a disconnect here, right? So while we're moving at a fast pace at home with dragging at work, so why can't we continue that speed while we at work?If your supplier has issues and you're not informed on time, you want to have an alternate supplier in place. If your suppliers are not qualified, you may not know that that needs to happen. And so when you have an integrated system that speaks to itself and is giving you all this data, you literally have the pulse of the organization in your hands as an executive at a money bound access.

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