Quality | Public Sector
Quality Consulting for Establishing a Sustainable Quality Management System at a Leading Railroad Company
A leading long-distance rail carrier managed quality issues without clearly defined roles or a centralized mandate. KBC helped establish a quality organization with clearly defined responsibilities. Building on this foundation, KBC developed a company-wide problem-solving process designed to systematically and sustainably eliminate errors.
Quality Consulting in Numbers
The Customer
A leading long-distance rail carrier
The client is a leading long-distance rail operator with a complex interplay of fleet management, maintenance, and operations. The central challenge for quality consulting lay in quality roles that were not clearly defined or implemented in day-to-day operations, a lack of centralized control over quality measures, and the absence of a clear mandate to prioritize quality tasks company-wide. As a result, many quality improvement initiatives stalled in implementation, even though the individual departments would have been technically capable of driving them forward. A quality organization capable of meeting these requirements therefore had to not only define roles but also systematically facilitate collaboration across departmental boundaries.
The Project
Quality Consulting for an Effective Quality Organization
KBC’s quality consulting began with a quality process analysis to identify existing gaps in the company’s quality management. Based on this, the project team defined the core quality processes and used them to develop a target model for the future quality organization. Since an organization of this size cannot be restructured in a single step, KBC developed several scenarios—ranging from centralized quality management to quality responsibility within the operational departments to a regional structure—and coordinated these with the client. The company then implemented the new organizational structure in phases, establishing clear tasks, competencies, and responsibilities. This resulted in an organization that, for the first time, did not merely exist on paper but was actually capable of assuming responsibility in day-to-day operations.
With this organizational foundation in place, the project team turned its attention to the second key question: How can a single quality issue be resolved in a structured and sustainable manner as soon as it arises, rather than merely addressing it superficially? In its quality management consulting work, KBC developed a new problem-solving process for this purpose, based on approaches from various industries, which covers the entire journey from the initial reporting of a defect to its permanent resolution. To ensure that the business units would actually use the process in their day-to-day operations, KBC also defined standard templates for process users and piloted the new workflow using selected examples from ongoing operations. The company then rolled out the process company-wide. This approach demonstrates how quality-related consulting combines the organizational perspective with a process that can be used in day-to-day operations.
The result
High-Quality Consulting with Measurable Results
By the end of the project, the client had established a quality management system implemented in phases, with clearly defined tasks, competencies, and responsibilities, as well as a central mandate for quality improvement measures. For the first time, the organization thus assumed central responsibility for quality, rather than addressing issues in isolation on a case-by-case basis within individual departments. This laid the foundation for treating quality no longer as a peripheral issue for individual departments, but as a shared, company-wide responsibility. This demonstrated the contribution that quality consulting can make to a clearly mandated quality management system.
On this basis, the company established a consistent and generic problem-solving process, which the departments successfully launched in eight pilot projects and permanently integrated into their daily work. The process created a structured approach to continuous problem-solving and, for the first time, enabled the company to consistently derive quality improvement measures from the actual root causes of errors, rather than merely treating symptoms. Thus, two initially separate areas of focus gave rise to a common foundation for sustainable quality improvement: an organization that takes responsibility and a process that brings that responsibility to life. The quality assurance consulting made this connection clear to the departments: they were provided with a clear workflow from the initial error report to the verified solution, rather than an approach that varied from case to case.
