8 replies to this topic

[trubertq]

Ok heres the thing....



How do we as a food processor put in place performance indictaors relating to customer satisfaction, apart from customer complaints, we are NOT going down the road of questionnaires as life is too short. Does anyone have any other suggestions for fulfilling the requirements of 3.4.4? I am stump ( not my area I'm a scientist I don't care whether the customer is satisfied or not so long as they are not poisoned... )

[Madam A. D-tor]

Dear Trubertq,

Is this is not your area, you shut lay the responsibility of this item to someone who is responsible for this area. Maybe your salesman or the director.

They should first determine the customer requirements and expectations (3.4). Note that customer requirements and expectations include more then only product characterics. e.g. development process, delivery times, stocking, etc.
The persons responsible for sale should know. what makes a customer happy/unhappy. If you can monitor these happy/unhappy things, these are the KPIs. Then the organisation should monitor and report these. Maybe the sales responsibles have annual reviews from there customers, where KPIs are included.

The Most common KPIs are: number of complaints per number of solid items, number of foreign bodies per sold items, number of suppy on time per number of supply, number of mancos per number of supply, time to handle a complaints in time, production number doing things right first time.

But please get your sales department involved for better implementation of BRC. As it is not your interest and not your responsiblity.

[D-D]

I have adapted a little SWOT analysis that I have asked the sales people to try as a way of capturing feedback when they have meetings. It should only take a few minutes to fill out and I have attached it in case it's useful - easy to copy over to your controlled document template.
Logging complaints and business trends is still good stuff too.

Attached Files

•  Customer Feedback Record.doc   37KB   317 downloads

[Foodworker]

This is commonly a confusing topic.

I am glad that you are not going down the route of questionnaires/satisfaction surveys as they generally add nothing to your understanding. Depending upon your customer base you tend to only get back survey forms from customers who love you or hate you. I never fill them in.

Phone surveys are sometimes used as an alternative. Providing it is not a vast amount of questions it is relatively easy for Sales staff to tag them on the end of one of their routine sales phone calls, assuming you have some people that do this.

Customer complaint statistics are the most commonly used indicator as described earlier.

Other indicators which you could look at are:



- Have the sales to individual customers gone up or down? Not an absolute measure and the current econimic situation needs to be factored in, but it is an indicator.



- Has the number of different products sold to individual customers gone up or down. If it has gone up you could take the inference that the customer trusts you and is satisfied

- Are you getting more customers? It could indicate that your reputation is spreading.

A said earlier, this type of data is best collated by a sales or Marketing department. If they are doing their job properly they should be doing this sort of thing already

[AlexK]

How do we as a food processor put in place performance indictaors relating to customer satisfaction, apart from customer complaints, we are NOT going down the road of questionnaires as life is too short. Does anyone have any other suggestions for fulfilling the requirements of 3.4.4?





I would recommend to first identify your Customers.

Usually Customers are those who pay $ for your products.

Then identify requirements of your Customers.

(Eventually needs of the Consumers shall also be taken into consideration!!!)

Then think how to measure how much the requirements of the Customers are satisfied with the provided products (including services).



=====================================================

An easy way to do so is to count events of "dissatisfaction" i.e. in PPM.

Danger here is that having small sample size will result in huge PPM score with each single nonconformance finding.

...however the AOQ calculation will work perfectly for those producing e.g. bags of rice and can spend e.g. 2 minutes to inspect 320 pcs. of rice grains every day.



It may be possible to avoid the need to actually get a feedback from your Customers by having a Final Inspection from a point of view of your Customers.

Results of such Final Inspection may be statistically evaluated to calculate either AOQ (Average Outgoing Quality) or AOQL (Average Outgoing Quality Limit - a totally different thing than AOQ!), both are usually measured in PPM.

(Calculations of AOQ usually assume that the defect rate in a process is known and is constant; that means that you have a controlled process, if you do.)



From Pyzdek's "Quality Engineer Handbook

the equation for AOQL is



AOQL = y [ 1/(sample size) - 1/(lot size) ]



where y is related to the acceptance number, c.



c y

0 0.368

1 0.841

2 1.372

3 1.946

4 2.544

5 3.174

10 6.535

=============================================



If you produce e.g. champaign or smoked pork legs: then you may consider to try to give some of the produce to your employees for lunch and score their feedback.

[AlexK]

(The "acceptance number" means number of rejects acceptable within a sample size: "0" - means single reject fails the inspection, etc.)

[trubertq]

Dear Trubertq,

Is this is not your area, you shut lay the responsibility of this item to someone who is responsible for this area. Maybe your salesman or the director.

They should first determine the customer requirements and expectations (3.4). Note that customer requirements and expectations include more then only product characterics. e.g. development process, delivery times, stocking, etc.
The persons responsible for sale should know. what makes a customer happy/unhappy. If you can monitor these happy/unhappy things, these are the KPIs. Then the organisation should monitor and report these. Maybe the sales responsibles have annual reviews from there customers, where KPIs are included.

The Most common KPIs are: number of complaints per number of solid items, number of foreign bodies per sold items, number of suppy on time per number of supply, number of mancos per number of supply, time to handle a complaints in time, production number doing things right first time.

But please get your sales department involved for better implementation of BRC. As it is not your interest and not your responsiblity.

I have shuffled it over to the Sales and Finance people, I'll let them figure it out, and HOPE they can talk to the auditor about it at the end of August.I know they have KPI meetinggs so maybe there is something in there they can use.

I am a consultant so I am not there all the time, and sometimes getting things done is like swimming through treacle. I am aiming for A grade...am I mad????

[Anish]

Hi,

Can you please explain what do you mean by mancos in this sentence - number of mancos per number of supply.

Rgds,
anish

[Madam A. D-tor]

Can you please explain what do you mean by mancos in this sentence - number of mancos per number of supply.

Maybe it is a Dutch term.
It means the missing issues on an order.
I will try to explain itt with an example:
A customer ordered several products: 10 times product A, 15 times product B, 35 times product C.
When the products arrived. The customer only received 10 times product A, 14 times product B and 35 products C.
The missing product B is called a manco (at least overhere. please let me know the proper English word)
This can be caused by: faults in order picking. loading mistakes, too less products in stock, etc. etc.
Mostly it is solved by credit notes or backorders.

I hope this makes clear what I meant.