Until 2011, our quality management (QM) system consisted of a collection of Excel and Word documents – centrally maintained, but with the usual time lag between what happened in practice and what was documented. This data pool met the minimum requirements for customers and auditors, but it never truly reached our employees in their day-to-day work.
When considering where the real value and potential of knowledge and organization lie within a company, the answer quickly becomes clear: in the corridors, and in the countless emails exchanged between knowledge holders. The major drawback of this informal system was that only those directly involved in communication benefited. Everyone else remained uninformed, losing sight of the bigger picture.
Management quickly realized that we needed to think more in terms of processes. All employees should document their process knowledge exactly where it originates – and that knowledge should be accessible to all, while also supporting managerial tasks.
By chance – if there is such a thing – we came across Q.wiki during an event hosted by RWTH Aachen. There we met Modell Aachen GmbH, who were already pioneers in the field of quality management, advocating for interactive management systems based on wiki technology and making them a practical reality.
Together, we launched our first pilot project. It quickly convinced the key decision-makers in our company, leading to a swift rollout across the entire organization.
What fascinates me about Q.wiki is that it offers an open platform where all stakeholders in a process can collaborate across departments. It allows us to discuss every detail of our processes together and agree on them as part of the overall workflow.
This means employees co-create their own processes with their colleagues – which leads to strong motivation to continuously improve and advance them, and to take ownership of the results.
Looking back, we had particularly favorable conditions in one critical area: From the very beginning, the quality management team, IT department, and executive leadership were fully aligned and working toward the same goal.
After several years of working with Q.wiki, the high level of acceptance is reflected in the usage statistics: we consistently log over 16,000 accesses per month!
“Q.wiki was the ideal introduction to knowledge and process management on a broad basis for us.”
“It is not certificates that carry out the processes successfully — it is the employees. And 86% of the workforce is in our management system every month.”
“In the past, regulatory processes and the like were a necessary evil. Now there is real added value for the workforce.”
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