In today’s complex manufacturing landscape, quality isn’t confined to one department; it needs to be the backbone of every decision, design, and process for every organization. Quality is a mindset. This is what Minitab’s Customer Insights Manager, Josh Goodman, discussed in our recent webinar, Building Confidence Through Holistic Quality. The webinar delves into what it truly means to take a holistic approach to quality, and why this mindset is essential for operational success.
The Cost of Fragmentation
According to industry reports, data silos, manual data entry, and limited visibility into production data remain a widespread challenge. This causes fragmentation within an organization and results in uncertain decision-making. When teams can’t see the full picture, efforts become reactive instead of proactive, and engineers are forced to make difficult decisions with insufficient information, increasing the cost of poor quality, which, in some cases, can be up to 20% of total revenue.
Defining Holistic Quality
We, at Minitab, define holistic quality as an approach to quality that looks at the entire system that creates value. It treats quality as a company-wide responsibility that spans people, processes, technology, and culture, with the goal of consistently delivering outcomes customers trust and organizations can sustain – creating visibility, traceability, and confidence in every decision.
The three core pillars of Holistic Quality are as follows:
- Visibility: Real-time visibility into your production data which allows for more efficient root cause analysis when things go wrong.
- Accountability: Sharing ownership across teams. When data and decisions are connected, quality becomes a collective responsibility embedded in an organization’s culture.
- Predictability: Using analytics and modeling to anticipate problems before they happen. By answering the “what if?” questions early, organizations avoid costly “what now?” questions.
Why Connectivity Matters
Disconnected systems increase risk for things in production to go wrong. Unplanned downtime can cost manufacturers an average of $260,000 per hour, and manual data entry errors can add over $1.5 million in general inefficiencies and rework costs annually.
A holistic data-driven quality approach spanning analytics, monitoring, structured problem solving, data-driven innovation, and process improvement is no longer optional. It’s the only way to operate with confidence in a demanding manufacturing environment.
Confidence in Action
Imagine an ecosystem of solutions where engineers can do all of the following:
- Collect production line data directly from the plant floor in real time
- Visualize performance trends through customizable dashboards
- Receive alerts when trending out of control
- Launch improvement projects with a set of structured tools
- Perform advanced analytics for root cause analysis
- Develop, implement, and validate an effective corrective action plan
- Run digital simulations to test “what-if?” scenarios before any change is actually made
This is the vision behind Minitab’s ecosystem of solutions. This is why we’ve invested in innovations to help you move forward.
Minitab Solution Center – Simplify and optimize your end-to-end workflow to make better, smarter, and faster decisions – all in the cloud. Click here for a free trial!
Simul8 – Drag-and-drop discrete simulation software so intuitive, fast and effective you’ll use it every day. Click here to get a demo! 
Prolink - Automatically Access Shop Floor Data Directly from Inspection Equipment for Quality Analysis. Click here to get a demo!
Together, these tools close the loop between data, people, and processes, providing the confidence needed to make faster, more accurate decisions.
If you missed the live session, the full webinar recording, “Building Confidence
Through Holistic Quality,” is available.