I've got a similar situation:
the Quality department in our company is perceived as a nuisance and that's on a good day. On the bad days, other departments would try to hide things away from us or simply don't tell us until their in the bog up to their ears.
Any kind of continuous improvement ideas (and we don't even call it that, we call it 'development' or 'support' or stuff like that) are met with ignorance or sabotage.
Overall, it's causing the whole company major extra cost both financially and workload-wise.
Where are we going wrong?
Where are you going wrong, as an organization? Let me speculate, if I may…
As I have been voicing for many, many years now, every organization in the World is dysfunctional to a degree. Successful organizations are the ones that manage to keep their dysfunctions in check and mitigate the impact of dysfunction, on a regular basis.
As part of typical dysfunction, in terms of cultural incompatibility with MODERN quality management, it is very common for organizations top management to misunderstand that the objectives of the quality function are NOT intrinsically aligned with the business objectives for the organization. Unfortunately, all too often organizations allow the misconception that the quality function’s main job is to POLICE the rest of the organization and avoid shipment of bad parts. In other words, they allow and foster a culture to permeate where the quality function is misperceived by the rest of the organization as an adversary that they to fight against, rather than to collaborate with. This phenomenon is still very prevalent around the World.
Sometimes, the quality function of the organization also misperceives their role and acts as the policeman on the block, creating unnecessary friction and fail to do their part as a contributing function. We also need to realize that, unfortunately, too many quality professionals don’t know how to insert themselves, in an added-value manner in the organization’s business processes and (as I repeat myself) explain that the quality system of any organization is NOT the system of the quality department, but, and instead, the quality component of the BUSINESS PROCESSES. Until that epiphany/enlightenment happens throughout the organization and the quality function can demonstrate how they help mitigate the risks that could prevent the organization from reaching it’s short, medium and long term business objectives, working WITH (and NOT AGAINST) the BUSINESS PROCESSES, your dilemma will remain.