We asked Palaniammal Rajamani, who works in Corporate Engineering at Tata Group - Tata Sons Limited, Bombay House, what he finds most valuable about APQC membership.
About Tata Group
Founded in 1868, the Tata group is a global enterprise, headquartered in India, comprising of 30 companies across ten verticals. The group operates in more than 100 countries across six continents, with a mission 'to improve the quality of life of the communities they serve globally, through long-term stakeholder value creation based on leadership with trust’.
What tools, expertise, services, or information do you use most?
Every six months, one of our QMS representatives visits the Resource Library and downloads the latest version of APQC’s Process Classification Framework (PCF)® aerospace and defense industry-specific framework in excel format. We go through the framework and look for additions, amendments, and deletions and get a rough list of the changes. The comments provided by APQC in the framework helps us review in detail if it the update should be adopted to our company QMS or not. We then take the internally decided amendments to our management team and request the changes be made in our QMS system. This is now a routine process followed to encourage QMS continual improvements and APQC serves to be a free and informative resource for TASL.
Additionally, the white papers in APQC’s Resource Library are a great read. The best learning that I have received is on process management.
It helped me get a different perspective of the QMS documentation activity and helped me visualize every process in the company as an interesting block that links and interacts with one another (swim- lane process flow). I also remember ending up with an A2 sized mind-map of the organizations’ QMS and was impressed with the way the processes flow to get the final job of aircraft assembly done.
How do you describe APQC within your organization?
APQC is the source for getting to know the benchmarks across the aerospace and defense industry that can be used as a reference during Tata Group’s annual review of our company QMS adequacy.
The PCF levels help us understand the basics behind the nomenclature, numbering series, etc. and help us align with the process-based approach.
How would you justify your APQC membership to someone?
APQC helps us adapt to the global terminology used in the aerospace and defense industry.
All OEM representatives understand that their supplier (new or existing) is communicating in a similar language that they do. This helps us bridge any gaps during the initial stages of assessments or system audits and builds confidence to both parties involved in the business decisions.
Why do you use resources from APQC?
APQC acts like a one-stop solution to our team for the QMS annual effectiveness review. Although there are 3rd parties (AS/ISO/Other Published Standards) we also reference, the QMS manager needs a consolidated list of the QMS database from a trusted source to help with a quick adequacy check; and for us, that is APQC’s PCF.
Even though there are some items not applicable to our company, the information provided in PCF master list helps us make an informed decision on adopting the said best practice.