From March 29 to 31, the Militzer & Münch Quality Management Conference was held in Athens. The Quality Managers of the Militzer & Münch Group discussed optimization potential and defined new strategies of quality assurance.

“Preparing for things ahead: Transition from risk to chance” was the motto of the conference that united 20 local and regional Militzer & Münch Quality Managers in the Greek capital. “When it comes to Quality Management, we need to be flexible and to improve continually”, says Dr. Lothar Thoma, CEO M&M Militzer & Münch International Holding AG. “To this aim, we keep an eye on the tendencies and developments of international logistics. That way, we can individually tailor our services to meet each customer’s requirements, and always offer the highest quality.”

 

 

New Quality Management norm

Focus at the conference was on the transition to the new Quality Management norm. The current DIN EN ISO 9001:2008 standard expires in September to be replaced by DIN EN ISO 9001:2015. Militzer & Münch is going to implement the new norm in the course of this year. The major changes:

 

• Quality strategy and quality objectives have to correspond to the strategic orientation and the context of the organization.
• Customer orientation includes new target groups.
• A process-oriented approach and comprehensive, systematic process management gain more importance.
• Group Management is to be more committed to Quality Management.
• For risk management, organizations will have to identify, analyze and evaluate risks and chances; counter-measures have to be designed and implemented.
• Knowledge management: a systematic management of knowledge is required. The knowledge necessary to execute processes has to be determined, maintained and made available to all employees.
• With the new norm, digital communication is allowed. So far, a printed version of a manual to document Quality Management was required.

Higher customer satisfaction

To assure quality, DIN EN ISO 9001 uses a PDCA cycle approach (see illustration). “Once the PDCA cycle has been gone through, it begins afresh”, says Kadir Kizkapan, head of Group Quality Management, M&M Militzer & Münch International Holding AG. “By constantly checking, we guarantee the continual improvement of the quality of our processes and thus higher customer satisfaction.”

Identifying risks

Another central topic at the conference was risk management. “At an organization that operates internationally like Militzer & Münch, various potential risk factors have to be taken into consideration for the specific countries”, Kadir Kizkapan says. “In their function, our Quality Managers therefore observe numerous political, socio-economic, ecologic and cultural aspects of their specific regions.”

Big success

The conference ended with a preview to the year 2017, with the participants discussing the pending changes, and the objectives of the Militzer & Münch Group. Kadir Kizkapan says: “We are very happy with the result of the conference. Our Quality Managers drew up highly promising suggestions and approaches to optimize quality assurance at Militzer & Münch.”