The success of your business is related to the success of your customers. It's a simple and rather obvious statement. Therefore, it's worth considering whether the culture in your organisation really links its success with the customer's. Operationally, do you consistently review how your product is performing for the customer or do you review how it performs in your internal tests? Most organisations lean towards the internal metrics where the information is more readily available, it's familiar and it's easier to verify corrective action. Unfortunately, it's not necessarily what the customer is seeing.
The same applies to internal supplier-customer relationships. The success of your department should be measured by the performance of the product or service you provide to your internal customer. Their success is your success. Their pain will eventually come your way.
The challenge is to create a culture of quality, where customer success is paramount and internal metrics are supporting. Organisationally, it can feel uncomfortable to the supplier in an internal supplier-customer relationship. Why is this other department judging my performance? We're supposed to be a team, right? In truth, every organisation has a customer and every organisation has a supplier. Owning your deliverable does not preclude teamwork nor should it stop you from asking for help.
Quality is often discussed in reference to design, control or improvement methodologies. I'd like to highlight a few characteristics of a culture that is focused on quality.
-Explicitly define the customers for your organisation. The alignment of organisation's priorities requires a clear understanding of who the customers are. It's the starting point. That information must be communicated throughout the team.
-Understand your customer's critical to quality variables (CTQs). It's always easier to understand how your product is performing through your process. That information is important. However, it is more important to understand what is important to your customer and how they measure that performance.
-Track the CTQ performance and how your product is affecting them. You can't improve something if you don't track it. The failure rate of your part or product in your customer's process should be visible to your team. If your customer is internal, data access shouldn't be a problem. If your customer is external, tracking that CTQ performance can be more challenging. Therefore, developing the relationships to enable such kind of information sharing is critical. If the customer is open to you embedding someone at their site, that would help enable the tracking and failure analysis. It must be done in a way that engenders trust.
-Benchmark the performance of your product against the competition. An organisation that is focused on quality strives to be the best. It relentlessly pursues new and better ways to do things. If you want to be the best, you've got to honestly compare yourself with the competition. That requires ongoing, consistent measurement of the competitor's product against yours.
-Own the performance of your product at the customer. Ownership implies understanding and commitment to customer success. Corrective actions should be pursued proactively before the customer escalates them. Tests should be developed to make customer CTQ issues visible in your process. Excursions should be error-proofed to ensure they don't recur, rather than just contained. Regular reviews of customer performance should be standard practice, not as needed.
Quality is critical. The customer can almost always choose to go somewhere else if they are dissatisfied - even internal customers. Methodologies to design, control and improve quality are available. But, as managers, our focus is to create the culture of quality. The use of the tools will follow.
Jeffrey D Nygaard is vice president and country manager, Seagate Technology. Follow his article every fourth Monday of the month.