In their efforts to decrease costs, improve customer loyalty and extend brand reputation, organizations need a holistic, long-term view of enterprise quality management systems.

1. Decoding Quality Management Systems
Quality defines the character of any product or process. To better
manage and extend brand reputation, organizations need a holistic,
long-term view of enterprise quality management systems to tamp
down costs and drive profitable growth by keeping customers loyal
and satisfied.
Executive Summary
Whether building a new product or improving
processes or services, quality is the bedrock of
an organization’s long-term success. In fact, qual-
ity increasingly defines the brand. Consider that
of the estimated 250,000-plus new products
launched annually, between 85% and 95% fail;1
clearly, to build a successful brand, companies
must make the most of the 5% to 15% of prod-
ucts that gain market acceptance — tough odds,
indeed, for building a winning business.
Although multiple factors can cause product fail-
ure, quality is considered by most experts to be
among the leading contributors. And if or when
products fail, companies need to understand
the role that quality played and and calculate
the resulting cost to their reputation and brand
image. Building in quality from the get-go is criti-
cal to market success and is typically attained
by deploying quality management system (QMS)
applications that help to continually improve pro-
cess efficiency and effectiveness to drive high
performance.
This white paper offers insights into the QMS land-
scape, highlights challenges of selecting the right
solution and partner, details leadership dilemmas,
and provides sound advice on how to make qual-
ity job one across the enterprise.
A QMS Primer
Several factors — including an ever-evolving
product manufacturing landscape, internal orga-
nizational challenges and a dynamic global
business climate — are driving organizations
across industries to transform product and pro-
cess quality, as well as keep closer tabs on supplier
quality (see Figure 1, next page). Market pressures
remain intense, both in heavily regulated indus-
tries, such as life sciences, medical devices and
food and beverage, as well as in industries such as
automotive and industrial manufacturing.
These pressures are driving organizations to
strive for the highest level of quality in all aspects
of their operations. However, they must overcome
many challenges along the way to achieving that
goal, as well as strong cost competitiveness and
rapid speed of delivery.
• Cognizant 20-20 Insights
cognizant 20-20 insights | october 2015

2. In the manufacturing world, QMS applications
provide the foundation for enforcing quality
policy and processes across the extended enter-
prise. Organizations often approach QMS as a
means to not only meet regulatory and compli-
ance requirements but also better manage and
achieve operational goals, such as enhanced
product quality, continuous business efficiency
and accelerated time-to-market. QMS maturity
plays a significant role in enhancing shopfloor
manufacturing operations, product and process
quality performance, and overall organizational
performance.
Figure 2 illustrates the role of QMS across the
value chain, revealing how these systems touch
every functional area, from product planning
and definition to customer engagement. It also
highlights how QMS addresses key quality areas,
including advanced product quality planning
(APQP), statistical process control (SPC), audit,
corrective action and preventive action (CAPA),
non-conformance (NC), customer complaints and
regulatory compliance.
 Globalization
 Resource availability
 Changing customers
 Continued drive for value
 Government regulations/
activism
 Need to address evolving
specifications & protocols
 Global alignment on quality
 Data management issues
 Recalls
 Compliance challenges
 Claims challenges
 Increased competition
 Value war
 Complex portfolio
 Increased global opportunities
 External failures
Evolving Industry
Landscape
Internal Challenges
Business Climate
Plan and
Define
Research and
Development
Process Design
and Development
Product and
Process Validation
Production/
Manufacturing/Assembly
and Packaging
Warehousing
and Distribution
Customer
QMS Touchpoints
 Quality policy
 Document
management
 Risk management
 Quality by design
 Good laboratory
practice
 AQL checks/
in-process checks
 Manufacturing
scale-up
 Supplier selection
 BoM and process
flow
 APQP/PPAP
 Supplier quality
 Audit management
 Change control
 Inspection and calibration
 Statistical process control
 Product traceability
 Non-conformance/
deviation handling
 CAPA/CAR/SCAR
 Quality of service
 Compliance specifics
 Customer complaints
Forces Driving Product and
Process Quality
Role of QMS across the Value Chain
Figure 1
Figure 2
cognizant 20-20 insights 2

3. cognizant 20-20 insights 3
Quality Process and
Application Challenges
At many organizations, quality is looked upon as
a separate department rather than as a shared
responsibility; as a result, it is often addressed in
a reactive and inefficient manner. In these cases,
quality remains a “just fix the issue” concern
rather than an investment in sustaining competi-
tiveness. However, winning organizations have
demonstrated that continued outperformance
requires a collective effort, in which every indi-
vidual who is part of the quality process shares
responsibility for meeting customer requirements.
Most manufacturers lack an integrated view on
quality or a consensus on which functions to
centralize, source, localize or share across the
enterprise. Most also lack enterprise-wide gov-
ernance; instead, each business unit has its own
mandate for budgeting and prioritizing quality. To
coordinate quality across the enterprise, senior
management must tap an executive with direct
responsibility for quality improvements within all
functional areas of the organization.
Quality processes — whose values are intercon-
nected and correlated — must be integrated to
fully leverage the data capabilities of applications
that manage quality. An integrated view estab-
lishes a culture of collaboration across functional
groups; for example, a production part approval
process (PPAP) requires close collaboration not
only between the purchasing and quality func-
tions but also with the external supplier.
Organizations have built a complex set of dis-
parate applications over the years to manage
enterprise-wide quality processes. These siloed
applications — including homegrown applications,
spreadsheets, point solutions and applications
based on outdated technology — are often not
integrated with one another and lack broader
functional capabilities to support the business.
Most of these applications are also heavily cus-
tomized and are non-intuitive; moreover, the same
application is often used differently across vari-
ous business units and geographies, and different
applications are sometimes used for the same
process to address internal and external qual-
ity. There is no single dominant application, and
little or no integration among applications. This
fragmentation, incompleteness and lack of consis-
tency have resulted in operational inefficiencies,
increased cost and end-user dissatisfaction.
Further complicating matters, multiple applica-
tions are often required to manage closely linked
areas such as audit management, non-confor-
mance (NC) handling and corrective action and
preventive action (CAPA). This forces users to
manually manage the linkage between an audit
finding and its respective CAPA.
Organizations wrestling with the complexity of
duplicate quality functionality and processes
across legacy systems usually attempt to simplify
and consolidate applications into standardized
platforms that help eliminate unnecessary costs,
as well as position enterprise QMS as a strategic
business capability for the future.
With the emergence of millennial workers —
tech-savvy, mobile-centric, socially-networked
employees who will dominate the workforce by
the end of this decade — the relevance and effec-
tiveness of addressing quality issues now requires
organizations to meet a fast-rising and accelerat-
ing benchmark for minimum digital competency.
This includes adopting an enterprise QMS, made
possible by the new digital-centric world.
With the emergence of millennial
workers, the relevance and
effectiveness of addressing
quality issues now requires
organizations to meet a fast-rising
and accelerating benchmark for
minimum digital competency. This
includes adopting an enterprise
QMS, made possible by the new
digital-centric world.

4. cognizant 20-20 insights 4
Selecting a QMS: An Executive
Determination
With minimal data or experience, business leaders
need to evaluate if or how a QMS they are consid-
ering delivers the following capabilities:
• Greater visibility and escalation of operational
quality issues.
• The ability to address potentially risky opera-
tional trends.
• Adaptation to regulatory changes and corre-
sponding business initiatives.
• The ability to impact quality procedures across
business units or operating sites.
• Coordination of quality control across suppliers
and extended partners.
A QMS investment requires a systematized pro-
gram approach to scoping, implementation and
management across system lifecycles. The follow-
ing factors should also be considered:
• The ability to bridge process gaps.
• Simplification of the existing technology
landscape and adoption of newer technology.
• Effort vs. benefits.
• Sunk investments.
• Growth strategy and business objectives.
Based on these factors, business leaders should
identify quality improvement opportunities by
assessing current process and application gaps.
The decision to grasp these opportunities and
commit to a future course must be viewed in light
of practical constraints, current and future needs,
business continuity and the ability of the organi-
zation to handle change.
The future course of action can be determined
by evaluating several possible hypotheses (see
Figure 3).
Key Factors Impacting QMS Hypotheses
The selected hypotheses will directly impact the
key considerations outlined above. In Figure 3,
Hypothesis 4 will have maximum impact on these
key factors and will offer the greatest level of bene-
fits with respect to the effort required. Meanwhile,
Hypothesis 1 and 2 will involve sunk costs for cus-
tomization or future upgrades to maintain the
systems or applications. While Hypothesis 1 offers
fewer long-term benefits, Hypothesis 3 helps close
the process gap through out-of-the-box (OOTB)
functionality; it does not, however, deliver greater
Evaluating QMS Investments
Figure 3
Hypotheses Outcomes
Existing New
MinimalChangeReengineer
ProcessGaps
Systems Gaps
Existing New
MinimalChangeReengineer
Process
Systems
• Leverage additional
features of current
systems.
• Harmonize processes and systems.
• Integrate current
systems with
necessary process
changes.
• Invest in new
“best-in-class” enterprise
QMS with significant
process improvements
for all dimensions.
• Introduce new
functionalities as and
when required in QMS.
• Continue with current
system. Build a custom
integration tool
to extract information from
other systems.
• Retain current
process
definitions.
• Use recent QMS
solutions and retain
current process
definitions.
• Huge effort required to
build integration tool for
disparate systems.
• Possibility of continued process
and system mismatch.
• User acceptance
likely to be
questionable.
• New solutions cover
only partial functionality,
requiring continued existence
of some functional silos.
• Process complexity might
decrease due to system
enablers.
•User acceptance likely to be mixed.
• Huge effort required to
build integration tool
for disparate systems.
• Possibility of continued system
and process complexity.
• May involve further
customization.
• QMS covering multiple
dimensions provides an
integrated quality environment.
• Significant process
improvements, leading
to key business benefits.
• User acceptance
likely to be high.
42 4
1 3
2
t
4
1
e
3

5. 5cognizant 20-20 insights
benefits than Hypothesis 4, and it provides little
long-term flexibility. The results of all four hypoth-
eses are summarized in Figure 4.
Evaluating QMS Applications
Because enterprise QMS centralizes various func-
tions (i.e., audit management, NC handling, etc.),
it can help improve quality management across
geographies and divisions through process stan-
dardization and automation. It creates a single
platform for cross-functional communications
and collaboration that synchronizes and ingrains
quality across the value chain.
Organizations are revisiting their quality strate-
gies and are in the early stages of centralizing the
quality function. QMS providers are beginning to
adopt elements of social networking, real-time
analytics and mobility, and are also working on
their next generation of products, as a result of:
• Cloud-based technology, which has the
potential to drastically reduce costs.
• Modular platforms that can accelerate return
on investment (ROI) before the full implemen-
tation is completed.
• Digital transformation.
Multiple niche and stand-alone players offer QMS,
as well as enterprise system vendors that are
incorporating QMS into enterprise resource plan-
ning (ERP), product lifecycle management (PLM)
and manufacturing execution system (MES) appli-
cations suites.
Figure 4
Hypotheses Assessment: Evaluating Potential Outcomes
Factors Hypothesis 1 Hypothesis 2 Hypothesis 3 Hypothesis 4
Solution capability to bridge
process gaps (through OOTB
or minimal customization)
Simplification of technology
landscape
Effort vs. benefits Low benefit
High benefit
Sunk investments
Current system
with customization
Current system with
future upgrades
Growth strategy and
business objectives
Depends on
adoption level
√
Plan and
Define
Research and
Development
QMS for R&D and Product Development QMS for Manufacturing and Distribution
PLM
ERP
CRMCRM
MES
Product and
Process Validation Production/
Manufacturing/Assembly
and Packaging
Process Design and
Development
Warehousing
and Distribution Customer
Where QMS Fits in the Manufacturing Value Chain and Technology Landscape
Figure 5
√
√
√
√
√
√
√
√!

6. To choose the right approach, organizations need
to understand the QMS landscape and their own
specific needs.
• PLM-based QMS is advantageous when PLM
investments have already been made. Gener-
ally, PLM-based QMS is best for organizations
that engineer complex products with a focus on
time-to-market. PLM helps integrate the func-
tions of quality from design through manufac-
turing by employing a lifecycle approach; this
approach ensures that feedback from sources
such as non-compliance and corrective actions
is routed to engineering to help address quality
issues. PLM couples model-based develop-
ment and simulations, helping organizations
to better leverage visualization and variation
analyses that greatly impact quality, as well as
reduce cost of quality (compared with physical
prototypes). In this scenario, a separate QMS
must be tightly integrated to leverage these
benefits.
• ERP-based QMS makes sense if the organi-
zation is in the middle of an ERP deployment.
Among the primary benefits of ERP-based QMS
is the use of a single platform, which reduces
the need for multiple systems and costly inte-
gration. For large organizations, an ERP-based
QMS is usually included as part of the broader
ERP deployment.
• MES-based QMS is best suited for an organi-
zation that is highly focused on manufacturing,
has already established operational excellence,
has a continuous improvement group seeking
to enhance quality processes and manufactur-
ing performance, and has harmonized quality
processes. Many MES vendors include com-
plementary QMS functionalities within their
solution sets.
• Best-of-breed QMS applications provided by
niche players typically represent the unique
quality needs of a manufacturing organization.
Their solutions generally offer reduced time-to-
value, lower costs and high flexibility compared
with dedicated PLM and ERP systems.
Business executives need to evaluate the advan-
tages and disadvantages associated with the
various solution types from a long-term strategic
standpoint to make a business case and forecast
the impact of the QMS build-vs.-buy decision.
Application types can be classified as point and
enterprise applications.
Point applications are typically offered as cus-
tomized off-the-shelf (COTS) or OOTB and are
implemented to address a particular need, such
as production part approval process (PPAP) or
audit management; they address an immediate
problem within a functional area of the organiza-
tion. Enterprise applications, on the other hand,
address the needs of the organization across
departments and functions, and include more
than one solution. They are scalable, configurable
and flexible enough to address future QMS needs.
Selecting a Best-Fit Enterprise QMS
Common challenges that organizations face when
deciding on a QMS include:
• Making the fundamental design choices
required to get the entire QMS challenge right.
• Keeping QMS lean, simple and agile so that the
right information gets to the right employees
at the right time.
• Ensuring the QMS fully meets regulatory
requirements and reduces compliance con-
cerns.
When selecting an application, organizations
need to begin with a long-term vision of their QMS
strategy. In the short term, a point application
often seems to be the most viable, cost-effective
option; however, organizations with a long-term
quality vision need to ensure that the solution will
evolve to meet their needs as they grow.
Over time, organizations typically invest in mul-
tiple point applications; however, the associated
costs (maintenance and support, training, licens-
ing, etc.) are often greater than expected due to
needed customizations. Eventually, organizations
move to an enterprise-wide application, under-
cognizant 20-20 insights 6
When selecting an application,
organizations need to begin
with a long-term vision of
their QMS strategy.

7. mining the time, effort and investment in the
point solution. When making their application
selection, organizations should weigh the follow-
ing parameters:
• Functionality.
• Industry fit.
• Ability to integrate with the organization’s
internal systems, as well as those of its
customers, partners and suppliers.
• Scalability and flexibility.
• Software pricing/licensing model.
• Vendor’s ability to provide service and support
across geographies.
• Ease of use.
Moving Forward
In today’s digital world, it is increasingly
important for business leaders to assess and
understand the potential for a QMS initiative
to enhance sustainable competitive advantage
and profitable growth. Effective QMS programs
build and support quality policies and processes
across organizational functions to not only fulfill
the company’s quality vision but also enable the
enterprise to be future-ready.
The success of the quality initiative to adopt
and implement an enterprise QMS requires the
unwavering commitment and dedicated support
of executive leadership. Evaluation conclusions
need to be supported by evidence and assessed
against criteria or standards agreed upon by busi-
ness executives. Justifying a decision involves the
following steps:
• Analysis of an evaluation’s findings and
synthesis of various sources of information to
reach a deeper understanding.
• Interpretation of the findings to convey
evidence in relevant ways that leadership can
truly appreciate.
• A comparison of investigative findings and
interpretations with agreed-upon criteria and
standards.
cognizant 20-20 insights 7
Footnotes
1 “The Most Memorable Product Launches of 2010,” Forbes, http://www.forbes.com/2010/12/03/most-
memorable-products-leadership-cmo-network.html.
Develop a flexible,
industry-leading QMS
solution to support
accelerated growth.
Leverage technology
as a competitive
advantage.
Deliver efficient QMS
solution that enables
organizations to win.
Strengthen QMS implementation
advantage across all business
units and geographies.
Business Objectives for QMS
Figure 6
References
• Peter De Boeck, Ulrich Huber, Kasper Jahn, Henrik Jørck Nielsen, “Reinventing the QMS: Adding
Agility and Robustness to Control and Compliance,” McKinsey & Co., 2014.
• “Beyond Compliance: The Strategic Role of Quality Management Systems,” Forrester Research, Inc.
• Joan Schneider and Julie Hall, “Why Most Product Launches Fail,” Harvard Business Review,
April 2011, https://hbr.org/2011/04/why-most-product-launches-fail.

8. About Cognizant
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About the Authors
Amit Joshi is a Consulting Senior Manager within Cognizant Business Consulting’s Engineering and
Manufacturing Practice. He has over a decade of experience in operations and consulting with manu-
facturing companies. Amit holds an M.B.A. from IIM, Calcutta, and a bachelor’s in technology from NIT,
Kurukshetra. He can be reached at Amit.Joshi2@cognizant.com.
Kalpesh Agarwal is a Consulting Manager within Cognizant Business Consulting’s Engineering and
Manufacturing Practice. He has over a decade of experience in operations and consulting for manufac-
turing companies. Kalpesh holds an M.B.A. from SP Jain, Mumbai, and a master’s in food technology. He
can be reached at Kalpesh.Agarwal@cognizant.com.
Hardik Kansupada is a Director within Cognizant Business Consulting’s Engineering and Manufacturing
Practice. He has over 18 years of experience in leading and managing strategic engagements, working
with C-level executives and end users. Hardik has a master’s in computer information systems from the
University of Houston. He can be reached at Hardik.Kansupada@cognizant.com.