Measuring Customer Complaints in PPM - How does your company define PPM?

[anil123]

In my Oganization, somebody is asking about the Complaint PPM calculation. As I am having automotive background I have have not yet come to this measurement or Term used.
If anybody is having any details on how to or how should we calculate the complaint PPM.

 

[John Broomfield]

In my Oganization, somebody is asking about the Complaint PPM calculation. As I am having automotive background I have have not yet come to this measurement or Term used.
If anybody is having any details on how to or how should we calculate the complaint PPM.

Anil,

PPM means parts per million. Six sigma professionals like to taik in terms of 3.4 "defects" per million opportunities to succeed in meeting requirements.

Applying ppm thinking to customer complaints could suggest that a complaint is a bad thing and yet we seek to be made better by more demanding customers.

You could express your customer complaints in ppm terms but you would have to calculate the number of opportunities that your customer had to complain! You may find that last month they had 100,000 opportunities to complain but you received just 1 complaint. That would equate to a ppm score of 10.

This unit of measurement may be appropriate to widgets nonconformities but I cannot see it being right for measuring the quality of services or for consistently measuring customer satisfaction.

John