AS9100 8.2.1 (C) or 9.1.2 (D) Customer Satisfaction - KPI's

[Valley PM]

I am the MR of a small machine shop and have just completed our Re-Registration audit. One of our findings was that we did not have any objective or metrics for customer complaints or requests for CA. We track OTD and Quality and have good metrics and objectives for those, but I am struggling with setting the objectives for the last two requirements.

I have asked another sister company, but I am getting conflicting answers between them and our Registrar. They are telling me that the standard does not tell you how many KPIs to have but our Registrar is telling me that there are 4 that are in the standard that we need to have objectives and metrics for. And the wording between C and D has not changed for what he has called out.

In all of this I have a couple questions:
1. Who is correct on the KPI's?
2. If I need metrics and an objective for CC and RCA's, can they be set quarterly or annually, or?
3. What is the industry norm for these objectives and metrics?

Thank You

 

[AMIT BALLAL]

Hi

There is no such requirement to add customer complaint or corrective action raising as KPIs. It depends on organization whether they need to monitor the same or not. Organization will use this KPI and monitor only if they need to.

Our organization monitors no. of customer complaints because customer complaints are high and we want to check whether our actions are effective enough to reduce no. of complaints. And earlier we used to monitor no. of customer complaints on monthly basis, which is now reduced to quarterly basis due to reduction in no. of complaints.

There is no such requirement to add these in KPI. Adding it in KPI or not is optional. But you need to monitor it for measuring customer satisfaction.

My suggestion would be to add this as KPI since it will help to gather data so that it can be used for measuring customer satisfaction further. And you can define frequency based on needs of your organization.


Thanks,
Amit Ballal

 

[howste]

There is no such requirement to add customer complaint or corrective action raising as KPIs. It depends on organization whether they need to monitor the same or not. Organization will use this KPI and monitor only if they need to.

I completely disagree. Looking at your profile I believe you're working in the automotive industry, not aviation, space and defense. The question is about AS9100 requirements and there certainly is a requirement for the organization to monitor the items mentioned above:

Information to be monitored and used for the evaluation of customer satisfaction shall include, but is not limited to, product and service conformity, on-time delivery performance, customer complaints, and corrective action requests. The organization shall develop and implement plans for customer satisfaction improvement that address deficiencies identified by these evaluations, and assess the effectiveness of the results.

This is the same requirement that existed in Rev C. In addition, while there is no requirement for something called a "KPI", AS9100 does require performance indicators:

The organization shall determine the processes needed for the quality management system and their application throughout the organization, and shall... determine and apply the criteria and methods (including monitoring, measurements and related performance indicators) needed to ensure the effective operation and control of these processes...

In all of this I have a couple questions:
1. Who is correct on the KPI's?
2. If I need metrics and an objective for CC and RCA's, can they be set quarterly or annually, or?
3. What is the industry norm for these objectives and metrics?

1. The certification body auditor is correct.
2. You can establish a frequency that makes sense and is effective for your organization.
3. I don't believe there's a standard answer for this, but the first thing that comes to mind is you could track the number of customer complaints and corrective action requests over time. You could also track the percentage of recurring complaints/requests to show effectiveness of actions.

 

[Valley PM]

Thank you both for the reply.

Howste, Thank You. That is how I was interpreting the standard. I could not argue with our auditor once he pointed out that section of the standard. Just trying to figure out how to make this beneficial to our company. I know we could just use RMA's as customer complaints, but I want to make this metric mean something to us as we do receive complaints in the form of emails asking for things that they do not like with our packaging or process that does not necessarily come in the form of an RMA, so we are using our program for RMA's to log CC as part of this requirement. Just trying to figure out a good metric to put in place but for now it seems that we are just throwing a dart at the wall until we can get some good data to review the metric.
Thanks again.

 

[AMIT BALLAL]

Howste, thank you so much for your reply and valuable comments.

But in fact, we are both saying same things.


Thanks,
Amit Ballal

 

[joburum]

Nothing wrong with using NCR's/RMA's as a form of customer complaint to monitor.