What is Digital Quality Management (DQM)?

Digital quality management (DQM) is a centralized set of digital processes for meeting quality standards. It’s a comprehensive approach to ensure the quality and integrity of digital assets and products throughout their lifecycle. DQM includes the systematic monitoring, analysis, and optimization of processes that align with established quality benchmarks.

In addition to assessing the accuracy and reliability of digital data, applications, and systems, DQM identifies potential issues related to quality, security, and overall performance. DQM enhances the digital experience for users by enabling organizations to efficiently manage and maintain the high standards of quality in the rapidly evolving digital landscape. For most manufacturers DQM is synonymous with quality management software (QMS).

What are the 4 components of digital quality management?

Planning

The foundation of DQM lies in meticulous planning. This involves defining quality objectives, setting benchmarks, and establishing a roadmap for implementation. Manufacturers in highly regulated industries must conform to industry-specific quality standards that stipulate the tools, processes, and documentation necessary to be a supplier or OEM in those markets. Examples of such standards include IATF 16949 (for Automotive), and ISO 13485 (for Medical Device).

Digital quality assurance

Quality assurance is how organizations assure themselves, their customers, and regulatory bodies that the expected product quality standards are met and maintained. To achieve this, DQM provides tools and processes for proactive, preventative measures that help manufacturers eliminate or reduce quality risk in both product design and manufacturing processes.

Digital quality control

DQM provides tools and processes to monitor and verify that product and process quality meets expectations. Unlike quality assurance, quality control is a reactive activity that enables organizations to swiftly identify and resolve quality issues as they present themselves. This includes establishing quality gates or quarantines, or even recalling suspect components/products to mitigate downstream exposure.

Improvement

DQM has a feedback loop for continuous improvement. By analyzing data and performance metrics, organizations can more easily identify opportunity areas for enhancement and implement changes to elevate quality—locally and globally.

Why is a digital quality management system important?

DQM provides a systematic and automated framework for monitoring, ensuring, and enhancing quality. This is significant because it minimizes the chance of human error, streamlines processes with automated reporting, and maintains compliance amidst ever-evolving regulations. Furthermore, DQM organizes complex digital processes while fostering sustainability and eliminating paper-based systems. For more on moving from paper-based workstreams to digitized processes to improve quality, read the Lifetime Products case study.

What are the benefits of a digital quality management system?

Automated reporting

Automation reduces the likelihood of human errors, begetting a more accurate and reliable quality management process. Automated reports from DQM provide real-time insights and therefore facilitate timely decisions and reactions.

Compliance with regulations

Amidst an abundance of stringent regulations, DQM helps to improve quality and regulatory compliance with industry standards. Not only do you avoid regulatory fines by meeting these requirements consistently, but you further protect your reputation in competitive markets.

Elimination of paper-based systems

DQM centralizes quality management processes, making them more accessible and organized. By moving away from traditional paper-based systems, DQM enables more sustainable and streamlined processes.

How to implement a digital quality management system?

Identify your current quality management system needs

Assess your current processes and identify areas that can be enhanced through digital quality management. This could include keeping up with industry requirements, how you operate within the supply chain, or the complexity of your product portfolio. Your current software ecosystem and integrations will ultimately dictate your DQM needs in terms of tools, deployment, and scaling requirements.

Choose a digital quality management system that fits your business needs

With a solid understanding of your system needs, you can best determine the right software product for your business. Consider your organization’s goals or priorities, as well as its size and industry requirements, when selecting a DQM system that best meets those qualifications. For example, your business may be focused on improving time-to-market or desire more time for innovating, which would benefit from a solution with strong change management and collaboration features.

Personalize your software

Amidst industry regulations and standardizations, each company operates in their own unique way. For whichever solution you choose, you now must configure workflows, interfaces, and integrations to introduce the tool into your ongoing processes as smoothly as possible. As with any enterprise software, consider role-based accessibility to foster collaboration, data sharing and automation opportunities, regulatory and auditing needs, and so on.

Set up a process to analyze reports

DQM can provide valuable insights into the quality of the data and performance of your enterprise. But these insights are only valuable if they are acted upon, which is why it is important to establish a systematic process for analyzing reports generated by the DQM system. Typically, this would involve regular reviews, feedback loops, and continuous improvement initiatives. By following a consistent process for analyzing DQM insights, you can enhance the reliability, accuracy, and usability of your data across your enterprise.

What it is the difference between PLM and DQM?

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and DQM play very different roles when it comes to product quality. DQM focuses on identifying and correcting data quality issues, using specific tools and measures (CAPA, dFMEA, etc.) to impact quality directly. PLM improves quality by way of managing, sharing, and changing product data in a single unified system – mitigating quality obstacles such as manual hand-offs and siloed systems.

PLM enables closed-loop quality by integrating quality management techniques across the entire product lifecycle, from ideation to mass production and beyond. This approach allows organizations to identify and address quality issues early in the product development process, reducing the risk of costly recalls and improving customer satisfaction.

Windchill is a leading solution for closed-loop quality management, providing end-to-end traceability and automated processes that accelerate innovation while meeting compliance requirements, minimizing supply chain risks, and addressing issues at the earliest stages.

DQM + PLM: An unbeatable combination

While DQM ensures the integrity and accuracy of your data, adding a PLM solution provides additional benefits that complement your DQM tool – from governance and traceability to cost-savings and collaboration. In other words, while DQM focuses on the quality of data, PLM provides a comprehensive view of the entire product lifecycle, amplifying the effectiveness of your DQM solution and more.