Elevating Industry Standards: The Launch of OASIS Insights

In this episode of The Quality Horizon, Eric Jeffries, president of the IAQG, and Greg Fontaine, IAQG Digital Focal, discuss the upcoming launch of a new reporting tool called OASIS Insights™

Slated to launch in April 2025, OASIS Insights is a tool designed to enhance quality management systems by providing organizations with a clearer understanding of their audit results and performance metrics. To learn more about OASIS Insights, visit https://iaqg.org/tools/insights. 

Transcript

Susan Matson: [00:20 – 00:58] Greetings, everyone, and welcome. I'm your host, Susan Matson, and with me today are Eric Jefferies and Greg Fontaine. Eric is the president of the IAQG. Additionally, he's been with Bell Textron for over 23 years, holding several positions in quality assurance, corporate compliance, government property, and quality inspection. Greg is a partner with Jasper Interactive and is the IAQG Digital Focal. Gentlemen, welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you. You're welcome. So hey, today we have some real exciting news. Next month, we're going to be rolling out a new tool to our system and the industry to assist with elevating the entire industry. We're calling it Oasis Insight. So Eric, I really want to start with you because I'd love for you to tell our listeners What is Oasis Insights?

Eric Jefferies: [00:58 – 02:06] Well, Insights is a reporting tool and it's going to bring capability that not just will drive improvement in our industry, but nobody, no certification scheme has ever had anything like it. Previously, no matter what scheme you're operating under, you get a report and you don't know how to make sense of it. Oasis Insights is going to bring a new level of visibility and understanding to what your quality management system performance is and what your audit results mean. So when you get your report, you'll get something that says, hey, I had two major findings, three minor findings, but you have no way to know exactly what that means specifically in terms of performance. And you've never had any idea about how you compare against your peer group or other organizations that are like you. So using Insights, each certified organization is going to get a performance rating. It's not only the performance rating for the last audit that they went through, it's going to show and track history over time. You're going to be able to see how performance improves year after year or where you need to make adjustments and drive additional improvement. It's a very exciting tool.

Susan Matson: [02:06– 02:15] Sounds like it. Greg, is there anything as a user or as a recipient of this tool or these reports that Eric just explained, is there anything we have to be prepared for?

Greg Fontaine: [02:16– 02:41] No. We are going to be giving you essentially a post audit set of insights to to how your audit went and trying to give you context and tools that will let you use that in a way to move forward and improve versus just, hey, How many NCRs do we have and are we still certified? We're trying to give context to an audit in a way that I don't think has ever been done anywhere before.

Susan Matson: [02:41– 02:51] It sounds like this is really for a number of different stakeholders within Insight. Eric, who really is OASIS Insights for?

Eric Jefferies: [02:51– 04:10] It's going to benefit a lot of different groups. The first target audience are the certified organizations themselves, because it does what I previously said. It helps them understand how they're performing, and how that performance compares to their peer group. So that's the first set. But it's also going to be helpful for organizations that manage other suppliers, right? So if you have a large grouping of suppliers to manage, this is going to give you insight into their performance that you've never had before. So if you're managing a supply chain, it's for you. If you're a certified company, it's for you. If you're a certified organization or a certification body that wants, you know, additional insight into the companies that you are certifying, it's also going to help you in terms of risk assessment and potentially how you need to adjust your audit activity. While in some ways the CBs have already had access to much of this data, they've never had the ability to pull it all together and to have kind of the higher level analysis that we're going to have that we'll be able to provide in Insights. And again, they've not known that relative performance. So it's going to really shake up how everybody looks at risk and performance within quality management systems.

Susan Matson: [04:10– 04:20] Great, thank you. Greg, sounds like there was a lot of work put forth to get to where we are today. So what is the timeline, the roadmap? How is this launching? When is it launching?

Greg Fontaine: [04:20– 05:07]  Well, as you said, it's probably about a month, give or take away. We are still refining certain aspects of it, but reports are running and being tested and analyzed. This is going to be an iterative thing. The first version of this is a starting point where we're using very, very fixed metrics that are easy to give context to the audit in. But going forward, there's going to be a whole series of versions. My guess would be they will probably see at least two, maybe even three more iterations of the Insights reports this year alone. It's been in the works for the better part of a year, and we are going to get it out there into the wild and get feedback and see other ways it can be used. And we will keep iterating through this as the year goes forward.

Susan Matson: : [05:07– 05:12]  Sounds like it's very valuable. Eric, I have to ask, is there a charge against this?

Eric Jefferies: [05:12– 05:39]  Well, there won't be a specific charge for Oasis Insights, but you're not just going to get insights in the future. We're bundling insights with some other things that will help our organizations benefit and drive improvement. There will be a future digital innovation fee that covers insights and many other things. So more information to come on that of how these things come together and what all is included. but there's no specific fee just for insights.

Susan Matson: [05:39– 05:50]  It sounds like another podcast at a later date too. Do people have a choice in participating in this information? Do I get to say whether I want to have this or not?

Eric Jefferies: [05:50– 06:20]  Well, in this case, we are providing a benefit to everyone. It's something that will be automatically rolled out, so you're not going to have to request it or do anything. It's automatically going to be provided to you after an audit. It's going to benefit everybody. Everybody's going to be able to see it. or utilize it, not everybody will be able to see it. So you will have some controls on who gets to see what elements of the report, but you're going to automatically get it. So no, you don't have a choice to say, I don't want this.

Susan Matson: [06:22– 06:44]  I don't know who would say that, but probably needed to ask that question. And I know that you touched on the value of this. I mean, obviously, getting some data about how we're doing something and how we're operating is always valuable. But let's talk from the industry level. What does this do for us as an industry, having this information at our fingertips?

Eric Jefferies: [06:44– 08:07]  I mean, it's a huge change for demonstrating the value that you get out of an audit. There's never been a way to quantify it or to have a set of data to help you target specific things that you need to improve. One of the things that we didn't talk about is, you're going to have scoring. You're going to have results in certain key categories like major NCRs, minor NCRs. repeat NCRs, which we've never been able to report on before. So, you're going to have all of that, but all of these things are going to link to some of our other resources. For example, if you get a report that says you had three NCRs, you'll get a link within the report that takes you to resources to help you drive improvement related to those specific topics. So, we're going to link to the Supply Chain Management Handbook. We're going to link to the AIMM tool so that it's driving our suppliers and our certified organizations to specific known best practices. So, rather than just being on your own and saying, I got to go figure out how to address this, we're actually linking you to some things that the IAQG has put together that are known to help drive improvement. So, it's more than just getting some numbers, which we've never had, and that is beneficial. It's about linking all of our products together and helping people find better solutions. to drive continuous improvement.

Susan Matson: [08:08– 08:16]  Sounds like a tremendous step forward for everyone. How is Greg, how is somebody actually going to access this? Where are they going to get this information?

Greg Fontaine: [08:16– 09:28] The Oasis Insights report is going to be generated when your audit is finalized, the same time the CB will publish the audit and generate the final audit report. Initially we are going to that is going to be located under the files area for a supplier. So it won't be visible initially during this first rollout to anybody other than the supplier. But it will be generated into their files area where all their other audit files from all their previous audits are, but this will be initially outside of the audit record. Eventually, the plan is to have that show up in the level two data where anybody that has access to the audit itself also has access to the OASIS insight reports. But during the initial rollout, we are making sure that suppliers get a chance to get familiar with it, see how the audit, you know, insights and ratings and other stuff go in and eventually we will change that. But initially they just need to go to their files area and they'll see the Oasis Insights report.

Susan Matson: [09:29– 09:36] So what kind of help is going to be available, Greg, as we roll this out? I'm sure people are going to be asking some questions.

Greg Fontaine : [09:36– 10:25] Sure. Now in the actual Oasis Insights report, all of the descriptions of the different pieces both the scored and the informational and this you know the other stuff we'll have descriptions both of what it is kind of how it's scored and we'll tell you that you know when there's a graph good is on the left side of the graph bad is on the right a higher number is better It will describe all of those things for you. In addition, there's also right at the top, next to the scoring, will be a link to a whole set of knowledge base articles in OASIS Knowledge Base that will give you the deep dive detail if you want to know more than just the general description. So there'll be some high-level information included right there in the report next to each piece of information, and then detailed information available for anybody that wants to go explore.

Susan Matson: [10:25– 10:36] Then for staying in touch with how the rollout's coming, when is it happening, where can people learn about those milestone rollout information?

Greg Fontaine: [10:36– 10:49] So on the main IAQG website, there are some pages for various tools and there will be a page on the Oasis Insights in that tools area of the IAQG website that'll give you various updates and other stuff up until we launch.

Susan Matson: [10:49– 11:06 Perfect. And I know that there's so many more questions I'd love to ask and we're going to hold those off for another podcast. But Eric, you started to dabble in this and you dangled a carrot that this is just the beginning. So can you can you give our listeners just a sense of what's coming? after this?

Eric Jefferies: [11:07– 11:56] Sure, so one of the the next version will include a risk rating as well. So this initial offering is going to show you how you compare it against your peer group, but it doesn't really have any weighting and so which which elements like major NCRs or repeats are maybe more important in evaluating overall performance. The next version is going to incorporate those elements in. In addition to the numerical rating, you get a risk rating, which will be probably color-coded like a red, yellow, green. We're still working through that. We haven't finalized the future releases, but we actually have the next three versions. that we're thinking through right now. What you get in the initial offering is just the beginning. It will continue to expand with each new release.

Susan Matson: [11:57– 12:11] Wow. It sounds amazing. Thank you guys so much for taking time. I know that you're feverishly trying to put the finishing touches on this flow out. Thank you so much for giving us some time and sharing it with everyone.

Greg Fontaine: [12:12– 12:28] This is one of several digital projects that are going to start letting the industry really take advantage of all the information that we've been collecting and all the stuff that's been put into the new version of Oasis. So not only is this just the beginning of insights, it's the beginning of a lot more to come.

Susan Matson: [12:28– 13:04] Sounds wonderful. Eric, Greg, thank you. Exciting stuff. And I am sure that our listeners are definitely going to want to learn more about this, because Greg, you did dangle that carrot as well. So I'd love to have you back, talk a little more about the details, maybe some of the technology behind all this. and really get a look and see about Oasis Insight and what exactly people are going to see, and more importantly, what they may not be able to see or the luxury to share or not share. Eric, Greg, it is a pleasure always to talk to you both. This is Susan Matson, and you have been listening to IAQG Quality Horizon. Until next time, stay safe all.