If you’re looking to streamline facilities management workflows and eliminate unnecessary waste, you must invest in a robust quality assurance program. An optimised quality assurance program is essential for businesses of any size.
For larger companies, it protects against waste, unnecessary expenditure, and helps foster positive relationships with customers and vendors. For smaller companies, optimising QA programs negates any such factors becoming a problem as your organisation evolves and grows. Read on for five easy ways to optimise a quality assurance program within facilities management.
1. The Importance of Regular Feedback
To optimise a quality assurance programme, you need to be gathering sufficient feedback from anyone actively involved with the process. When gathering feedback, make sure data is properly organised in a central database. This not only makes accessing data far easier, but it also allows for straightforward comparison and in-depth analysis.
For gathered data to be useful, you’ll need to ensure that your QA process is ironclad. Where possible, avoid complex procedures that complicate how data can be measured and interrupted. Ultimately, if you’re struggling to draw clear conclusions from data you’ve collected, your QA process and testing strategy aren’t fit for purpose.
2. Invest in Training
If you’re ushering in a new era of quality assurance within facilities management, everyone involved in the process must be provided with sufficient training. This goes beyond those brought into an organisation solely to work on quality assurance programs. Anyone involved in delivering quality assurance needs to be fully versed in your optimisation efforts.
Once you’ve ironed out the specifics of your QA procedures, make them a staple part of your onboarding process for new hires. When it comes to optimising QA processes within facilities management, you mustn’t overlook the importance of interdepartmental communication and collaboration.
3. Determine a QA Testing Schedule That Works For You
Although it’s important you carry out, you don’t necessarily have to go overboard when it comes to testing frequency. In many cases, reducing testing frequency can improve your QA performance overall. Many organisations realise too late that they’ve been investing countless unnecessary resources on testing processes that aren’t called for.
Even if testing procedures are relevant, running checks too regularly can result in problems. Often, organisations realise that carrying out frequent checks delivers unreliable results that can’t be used to realise any useful findings. It’s worth remembering that many individual processes are subject to high degrees of variance. If this variable occurs over short stretches, carrying out frequent checks is likely to lead you down the wrong path.
4. Don’t Be Afraid to Embrace Change
When it comes to quality assurance, change is something to be embraced, rather than avoided. QA trends are prone to change and you’ll need to keep your finger on the pulse if you want your methods to be up to the task of optimising quality assurance programs.
However, express caution when navigating and selecting new trends. Even within facilities management, QA methods vary considerably. Due diligence is crucial when investigating new trends. Explore what others are doing within your field and consider sharing your own experience and personal findings. Although some facilities management professionals may be wary about sharing business collateral with others, moderated networking will go a long way here and make it easier to optimise your QA processes
5. Create an Asset Management and Replacement Plan
Despite best-laid plans, there are bound to be situations when assets fail or don’t pass muster. When you encounter these situations, you must know how to progress and what to do with a failed asset.
In certain cases, repairing a failed asset may prove cost-effective. In other scenarios, repairs may prove too costly or time-consuming. In these instances, you’ll need to have a robust system in place for procuring replacements.
As such, it’s vital that you take the time to consider the value of any given asset. This goes beyond simply weighing up asset value at the point of purchase. Ultimately, you’re going to have to consider long-term implications when choosing an asset.
Questions you’re going to need to consider include how much an asset failure will cost your organisation. Think about the time it might take to source a replacement, the outlying cost of purchasing that replacement, and other outgoings such as installation. Once you’ve answered these questions, the initial estimate for asset value may be way off. If there’s significant disparity, the QA process has just highlighted an area of your operations that needs a serious rethink.
Final Thoughts
Optimising a quality assurance program within facilities can seem daunting, but it’s a vital step for organisations of any size. When optimising your own QA program, ensure you’re making use of regular feedback and keep data organised in a central database. It’s also important you introduce key personnel to the specifics of your QA process from the off. If you need to, train new hires on QA specifics as part of the onboarding process.
Determining a QA testing schedule is also something to consider. Don’t waste resources on testing too frequently and remember that too much testing can often skew data. Finally, embrace change by investigating and applying new QA testing trends.
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Author Bio:
Ray Brosnan is the co-owner of Brosnan Property Solutions, a property maintenance and facility management company based in Ireland. Brosnan Property Solutions also offer domestic services such as plumbers, electricians, rood repairs, and much more.
