Creating Internal customers within the manufacturing process

[Max Brear]

I am an engineer working for a security paper manufacturer in the UK. Recently I have been assigned a new role, looking at the possibility of our company adopting six sigma in order to combat product variation.

In order to do this successfully I want to begin and develop the concept of internal/External customers, but am finding this increasingly difficult as most of the staff have been at the company along time and are ristrcting change.

Does anyone have any recommendations as to how I go about promoting this change? What are the initial steps I should take, are they adminastrative, or do they involve a management "shake-up"?

Please can you help.

 

[E Wall]

Role Playing

To me what you have stated seems a communication problem. Let everyone know that you are not adding anything new (yet), just looking at what is done in a different way.

Although we did this for ISO not for Six Sigma purposes...At our site we gave these examples (we manufacture industrial batteries):

Departments (Partial list for example):
- Materials (Purchasing & Shipping)
- Maintenance
- Quality Assurance
- Production (which includes: Casting, Oxide, Pasting, Assembly, and Formation)

Make the statement that it is their responsibility to meet their customers needs and expectations, which requires communication.
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EXAMPLE:
Materials, Maintenance, and QA provide either services (support or testing) or raw materials needed for the Production Departments to manufacture product. So each production department is a customer (internal) of theirs.

Each production departments vendor (supplier) are all processes (input of product or service) that is needed to meet their production goals and their customer is the process that uses their output materials. Pasting: Recieves raw materials from Casting, Oxide and Materials; and services from Maintenance and QA - so they are suppliers. They provide a product to Assembly - so that is their customer.
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This really shouldn't be too difficult as long as you keep the example simple for your location. In (very basic) words: Any input by another department/process identifies them as a supplier. Whoever receives your output (not just product but reports too) is a customer.

This is something posted in another thread which might help to identify what the inputs/outputs may be:
Generally the output from one process is the input for many other processes. Because ofthisrelationship, inputs and outputs can have similar characteristics. The following incomplete list is of some general types of inputs/outputs:

Needs
Ideas
Expectations
Requirements
Inforamtion
Data
Reports
Records
Documents
Resources
Decisions
Plans
Instructions
Results
Measurements
Products
Services
Proposals
Solutions
Authorizations
Feedback
Comments
Complaints
Action
Control
Reaction

ISO 9001:2000 QMS is composed of many processes that are bunched together by input-output relationships. These input-output relationships turn a simple list of processes into an integrated system.

Okay, this response is longer than I planned...but hope it helps.
Eileen