Need to update to ISO 9001:2000, current registered to ISO 9002

[Sean Kelley]

Some of the new biggies of ISO92K are Quality Objectives - Define a few upper or corporate level objectives and they don't have to be just "quality" related. Then have some supportive dept level objectives. Example: On time delivery is corporate level objective and maintenance downtime for a production supports it. After all if the line is not running then you can not get the customer the product.

Next biggie is customer satisfaction and how to measure it. Our registrar has openly admitted this is the first thing they will look at every time. If our customers are happy they are likely to be more lenient. How do you measure customer satisfaction effectively and not be a huge pain? Usually you just ask them. How? Many companies are going the survey route which is ok but quite often only the slightly ticked off customers fill these out. If they are happy they may not bother and if they are thoroughly ticked they will just pitch it and not use you. Maybe I will start a new thread and ask How to measure customer satisfaction? Great hope that helps and this forum is a great resource. I am personally likely to join soon as I see many benefits for the $25 I just wish I could get my company to pay for it.

 

[Cari Spears]

How do you measure customer satisfaction effectively and not be a huge pain? Usually you just ask them. How? Many companies are going the survey route which is ok but quite often only the slightly ticked off customers fill these out. If they are happy they may not bother and if they are thoroughly ticked they will just pitch it and not use you.(

Everywhere I've worked they had the survey thing going on, faxed or mailed. You're absolutely right - I generally only received about a 30% response. I am the purchasing agent at my current job, and I have to admit - they become the bottom of my low priority tray.

Our Sales Manager and I have decided to try a different route. We are working on a short survey and a rating system. We plan to have each sales rep. survey the customer during routine sales calls. They call on the customers regularly anyway - this will take up about 10 minutes once or twice a year (we haven't decided yet). This way we avoid only getting responses from the "slightly ticked off customers". We also avoid wasting time (and trees) faxing or mailing only to get no response.
This will also ensure that the survey ends up getting to the right person.

This annual or 6mo survey, in conjuction with customer complaints and our hit/miss ratio for quotes submitted, is how we intend to gage customer satisfaction. We'll see how it goes!

 

[C Emmons]

Cari,

That is pretty much the system I have set up in my company. Our sales guys administer surveys (Chosen random from the system based on their sales panners). These are geared toward an aministrative level (the people actually in control of awarding the business or taking it away). We also have a second survey with different questions that our Managers administer, geared more toward operations. Gives us a pretty good overview.

 

[Cari Spears]

C - Nice!
I didn't think about the "geared toward operation" side. Who does the Manager contact? The buyer as well?

 

[C Emmons]

Well, my business in tranportation. So the Managers are contacting the people working in the Shipping and/or receiving areas of different businesses. This allows me to record perception based on local terminal facilities (drivers, local customer service reps etc.).

The same customer could end up with two surveys, but we usually are not talking to the same people based on the questions. It is really neat to see if the perception at both levels match up!

 

[Cari Spears]

Thank you - you've given me some food for thought. I'm going to bring this up to the team and see what they think.

 

[C Emmons]

More than welcome, I guess thats what the formum is all about! Believe me, I have received more food from thought from the Cove than I have contributed thus far!

 

[Groo3]

Wow... lots of good advice here. I'll chip in my 2 cents and hope it helps. I agree that if you can get your registrar in to complete a pre-assessment, you may be able to focus your efforts where you need to. I do however recommend that you at least have a QM and the required procedures in place before you do that.

As I see in some of the replies above, I also believe in the keep it simple approach. I have found it easier to work on the requirements using a top down approach... Start with the Goals and Objectives of your organization (start with basic goals of your organization = xxxx units per month, reduce scrap/discard by 10% over last year's average, 100% on-time delivery, 0 lost time accidents, etc). When a parent company is involved, some of these goals come straight from the head office. Those may help you understand what is important to your organization and what details you may need to put into your Quality Manual.

The Quality Manual can be as simple or complex as you wish to make it. One of the transition courses I attended led the class to believe that our QM could be 2 pages long. In reality, we ended up cutting about 15 pages from our former QM, but our manual is still about 45 pages. Our choice to keep it this long. I believe that we probably could have gotten our manual down to about 5 pages if we really wanted. You may wish to start with a "canned" QM and tweak it. That may help to get you less worried about your deadline?

Once you have a QM, make sure you have the minimum required procedures. I recommend that you use flowcharts liberally, a picture is sometimes worth more than 1,000 words. Two things I use to help reduce the volume of our procedures is to (1) include a flowchart of the process and (2) define the roles and responsibilities of those involved in that process. Keep it as simple as you want, as long as you can show that what you have documented meets the requirements of the standard, represents what goes on in your organization, and is effective.

Those highly documented - detailed work instructions can be left alone as long as they support what your higher level documents are saying and represent the current process? Why reinvent the wheel? Can you simplify them with flowcharts? probably, but you may not need to...

From my experience, the two biggest changes we needed to address with the new standard were competence and customer satisfaction. Our old system did not directly address either of these issues, so we had a big learning curve with these two. In fact, we are still in the process of addressing competence issues.

Customer Satisfaction on the other hand is something we have basically pooled all of the various pieces of information which may represent whether or not a Customer is satisfied (survey's being just one small piece of that overall picture). We have basically flowcharted the various pieces of information (market share, surveys, customer visits, customer requests, customer complaints, customer report cards, etc.); these represent an input into our Management Review. Our Management Review then makes a determination if any actions are needed to improve what we are seeing? we also continue to monitor the various pieces and look for improvements over time... A flowchart and some roles and responsibilities and we call it a procedure.

Not sure if any of this helps, or if you would want to duplicate some of our efforts? but keep it simple where you can and good luck. E

 

[vpickell]

How's it going Vickie?

Things are going well, I have put to use many of the great suggestions and ideas that I have received. Qualilty Manual started out canned and is now almost treaked to our company. Working on leaning the procedures that were previously wrote like novels, with doors leading everywhere. Would be an auditing nightmare for our company. No really value in them, except maybe they meet the standard.
so......I'm off and running.
Thanks again