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Having recently changed companies I am finding myself in a position of dealing with a difficult customer. I'm looking for some advise from the cove in how to approach this issue.
We currently supply into two separate docks at our customer, in one dock we recieve perhaps one or two customer concerns a month, in this area the customer investigates a concern before raising the paperwork against us as a supplier.
The other dock however we recieve 60+ concerns a month! Of these perhaps only 10 will contribute towards our ppm score, the others are minor issues (pads out of position - discovered after point of fit). Whilst we dispute these issues, the paperwork is raised and official 8D responses are required. This means that as a company we need to respond to at least 3 - 4 customer concerns a day.
Our customer is obviously working to two different levels but as a company all we want to do is improve. The philosophy for continuous improvement is a step by step approach but with the number of concerns being raised we are finding ourselves responding more as a paperwork exercise than actually closing out concerns which we want to do with full preventative and corrective actions. Our customer is unrelenting and refuses to not raise paperwork on minor issues that do not cause any lineside issues.
To make things even worse, the product we are supplying is from processes subcontracted to us by the customer. We have master samples issued and signed by the customer, however our customer now refuses to accept that this standard still applies. Before Christmas we were improving our performance, however following Christmas, our customer has changes the standards again.
The parts we supply are in a far better condition than the initial master samples approved by our customer but still we get hit for everything. We have recently been told that the concerns not on our PPM will be raised to PPM level in September.
As a company we know where our issues lie and are working to put them right, however the time spent responding and discussing the minor non important issues is ending up the same as investigating what we and our customer see as key issues. How can a customer expect a full corrective / preventative action on 60+ concerns raised a month when a absolute maximum of 10 would be raised by any other customer I have dealt with.
Woah, waffled on a bit there, if anyone has any advise on how to approach this it would be appreciated (by the way we only receive 1 month to reply to concerns before we are demerited as a supplier).
We currently supply into two separate docks at our customer, in one dock we recieve perhaps one or two customer concerns a month, in this area the customer investigates a concern before raising the paperwork against us as a supplier.
The other dock however we recieve 60+ concerns a month! Of these perhaps only 10 will contribute towards our ppm score, the others are minor issues (pads out of position - discovered after point of fit). Whilst we dispute these issues, the paperwork is raised and official 8D responses are required. This means that as a company we need to respond to at least 3 - 4 customer concerns a day.
Our customer is obviously working to two different levels but as a company all we want to do is improve. The philosophy for continuous improvement is a step by step approach but with the number of concerns being raised we are finding ourselves responding more as a paperwork exercise than actually closing out concerns which we want to do with full preventative and corrective actions. Our customer is unrelenting and refuses to not raise paperwork on minor issues that do not cause any lineside issues.
To make things even worse, the product we are supplying is from processes subcontracted to us by the customer. We have master samples issued and signed by the customer, however our customer now refuses to accept that this standard still applies. Before Christmas we were improving our performance, however following Christmas, our customer has changes the standards again.
The parts we supply are in a far better condition than the initial master samples approved by our customer but still we get hit for everything. We have recently been told that the concerns not on our PPM will be raised to PPM level in September.
As a company we know where our issues lie and are working to put them right, however the time spent responding and discussing the minor non important issues is ending up the same as investigating what we and our customer see as key issues. How can a customer expect a full corrective / preventative action on 60+ concerns raised a month when a absolute maximum of 10 would be raised by any other customer I have dealt with.
Woah, waffled on a bit there, if anyone has any advise on how to approach this it would be appreciated (by the way we only receive 1 month to reply to concerns before we are demerited as a supplier).
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