Embedding Quality in a Changing Environment

This video provides an in-depth strategic overview of how Valerie Sieurin, the Senior Vice President Global Head of Quality at Reckitt, is driving systemic cultural and technological transformation within the company’s global Quality function. Reckitt, a multinational generating approximately £14 billion annually across hygiene, health, and nutrition categories, faces the challenge of ensuring product safety and trust while selling over 20 million products daily across 60 countries. Sieurin’s primary mandate is to design and implement a comprehensive Quality strategy that embeds high standards throughout the entire product lifecycle, from procurement and manufacturing to distribution and sales, ensuring products are "safe, trusted, and preferred" by consumers.

The core of Sieurin’s transformation strategy centers on identifying and mitigating systemic weaknesses. She quickly pinpointed two critical areas requiring immediate focus: improving consumer relations and addressing areas of repeated operational failures. Historically, the corrective and preventive actions (CAPA) for these failures often relied heavily on retraining personnel. Recognizing that "we are humans, we are making errors," the strategic shift was to move beyond training as the sole solution and instead leverage technology to fundamentally alter processes and reduce the capability for human errors to occur. This perspective highlights a move toward proactive, technology-driven risk mitigation rather than reactive, human-centric correction.

This pursuit of error reduction led the Quality leadership team to actively explore advanced technologies, specifically educating themselves on the principles of Quality 4.0—the application of the fourth industrial revolution technologies (like AI, IoT, and advanced analytics) to quality management systems. Reckitt’s approach to technology adoption is highly strategic: they first identify internal knowledge gaps and areas where external expertise would add significant value. They have targeted specific domains for partnership and collaboration, including consumer relations, laboratory operations, and the core Quality Management System (QMS). The criteria for selecting partners are stringent, requiring not only current capability to support their needs but also the capacity to join Reckitt on its long-term transformation journey, ensuring sustained innovation and evolution in hygiene, health, and nutrition.

Key Takeaways: • Shifting from Training to Technology for Error Reduction: The traditional CAPA approach of retraining employees following failures is deemed insufficient because human error is inevitable. The strategic imperative is to implement technological solutions and process redesigns that reduce the opportunity for human errors to occur, thereby enhancing overall operational reliability. • Quality 4.0 as a Strategic Framework: Reckitt is actively studying and adopting technologies aligned with Quality 4.0 principles. This framework involves leveraging advanced digital tools (such as AI, automation, and data analytics) to modernize QMS, improve predictive quality, and enhance compliance in regulated environments. • Targeted Areas for Digital Transformation: The Quality transformation is focused on three specific high-impact areas: optimizing consumer relations processes, modernizing laboratory operations (likely involving data integrity and automation), and upgrading the core Quality Management System (QMS). • Strategic Partnership Criteria: When seeking external partners, Reckitt prioritizes firms that can demonstrate both immediate capability to solve current problems and the long-term capacity to evolve alongside Reckitt's ongoing transformation journey, emphasizing a collaborative, future-proof approach to technology adoption. • Embedding Quality by Design: The future focus of the Quality strategy is to continue driving efficiency while ensuring that products are "by design" engineered to be preferred by consumers and trusted, indicating a shift left in the quality process to integrate standards early in product development. • The Role of Global Quality Leadership in Transformation: Cultural and systemic change in a large, global organization is driven by engaged quality leaders worldwide who challenge existing programs and contribute new ideas, underscoring that technology adoption must be paired with leadership buy-in and cultural alignment. • Regulated Industry Context: Reckitt’s operations in health and nutrition (including brands like Nurofen, Durex, and Enfamil) mandate strict adherence to regulatory standards, making the pursuit of robust, error-proof QMS and data integrity solutions essential for maintaining compliance and consumer trust. • Scale of Operations: The company’s massive scale (selling 20 million products daily across 60 countries) necessitates highly scalable and automated quality systems to manage complexity and ensure consistent safety standards across diverse distribution channels (offline and online).

Key Concepts:

• Quality 4.0: Refers to the integration of advanced technologies (AI, IoT, big data, cloud computing) into quality management processes to achieve unprecedented levels of efficiency, predictive capability, and compliance.
• QMS (Quality Management System): The formalized system that documents processes, procedures, and responsibilities for achieving quality policies and objectives. Reckitt is seeking partners to transform its QMS using modern technologies.
• Human Error Reduction: A strategic goal achieved by redesigning processes and implementing automation (often using AI or robotics) to minimize the reliance on manual tasks where human mistakes are most likely to occur.