Units Per Pack 15 High Performance Underpads 23" x 36" Green First Quality UP150
Units Per Pack 15 High Performance Underpads 23" x 36" Green First Quality UP150 Feature
Read more
Units Per Pack 15 High Performance Underpads 23" x 36" Green First Quality UP150 Overview
"FQPUP150 (Pack)---First Quality
Units Per Pack 15---Size : 23"" x 36"" Color : Green
Provides high performance linen protection. All underpads are ""C"" wing folded for ease of application. Facings are spunbonded polypropylene which is naturally fire retardant and skin friendly with no plastic edges. Latex free."
Read more
RelateItems
Review Rating : 
Brand : First Quality
List Price :
Special Prices : Check Special Offers 
Availibility : Usually ships in 24 hours
Jan 16, 2012 17:57:24
Tag: Units Per Pack 15 High Performance Underpads 23" x 36" Green First Quality UP150,First Quality, Units Per Pack 15 High Performance Underpads 23" x 36" Green First Quality UP150
What infuses so many quality management programs, departments, strategies, and initiatives with momentum is when the needs of customers begin driving an organizations' quality management agenda. The ability to harness these often complex, at times conflicting, and often mercurially changing customer requirements is essential for quality management processes and systems to grow in alignment with customer needs.
Aligning with only internal measures of performance can lead to myopic results; instead what is needed in many organizations is a re-engineering of how the Voice of the Customer (VoC) influences the objectives of and direction for quality management. Capturing the voice of your customers isn't as easy as just visiting them once every six months or a year, or as difficult as creating expensive, complex and difficult-to-administer Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications. In fact, getting in touch with your customers don't necessary mean having to purchase anything, it's more about first making the commitment to listen to them, build out systems and processes to capture what they think, find the critical points regarding product and service quality, and then automating the newly-designed process.
First Quality
Roadmap to Integrating Voice-of-the-Customer with Quality The intent of this article is to provide a roadmap or set of instructions for your company to create a Voice-of-the-Customer Framework and also provide guidance along the way about which processes you may choose to automate through the use of CRM software. Customer relationships are not a series of processes you can just throw software or money at to make improvements in; rather these processes require a highly integrated set of strategies, focusing on earning and retaining customer trust, working towards long-term loyalty, driving up the lifetime value of customers in the process. Quality Management has everything to do with how customers perceive your company, from the many touch points customers have daily with sales, service, aftermarket products and warranties.
Getting a VoC program integrated into Quality Management needs to begin with these processes defined below, working to make them as efficient as possible through breaking down previous process roadblocks to their accomplishment. Business process management (BPM) needs to be used for the more complex processes as an approach to first analyze then make more efficient those processes that touch customers, manufacturing and quality.
First, prioritize which customer processes are most dependent on quality, and start measuring your performance on them - from the customers' perspective. It's too easy to measure internal processes by our own metrics - sure, we can make it look great, yet in the end, exceeding customers' expectations using quality as the differentiator is critical. A prime example of one of these processes is the Engineering Change Order (ECO) process, where customers' requirements for a purpose-built product are defined and then communicated to engineering, sales, program management, quality management for review and approval of competed modification, document control and back to the customer with the change completed. This entire process, while many in an organization may see it as purely engineering centric is actually one of the most customer-centric processes manufacturers has. While re-defining all processes that impact a customer is unrealistic, changing how your company interacts with and listens to customers is easily changed. It doesn't require significant spending in software either. Investing in CRM software after the major customer-facing processes, like ECO Management, quality audits, and on the sell side, quote-to-cash and comparable processes are streamline, lean, efficient and most critical to serving your customers.
Second, get to know your customers at both the executive and day-to-day execution levels again. Too often when companies initiate VoC programs they immediately call up the highest ranking customer contacts they have, hoping to get a commitment to participate in feedback sessions, even advisory council meetings. While the roster of executive titles may be very impressive in terms of advertising a VoC initiative both inside and outside the company, it does little to make day-to-day execution change. C-level executive advisory councils have their place for strategic changes, and large-scale modifications to programs, pricing strategies, services, support, and product lifecycle decision points. For many companies what's needed isn't an abundance of strategic vision but a concerted and intense focus on how to improve the many processes that comprise customer relationships. So get in touch with and really understand the day-to-day execution challenges of what you as a company has for those trying to do business with you. Meeting those at your customers responsible for day-to-day execution will also make quality problems now have a name, a face, a direct dial number - in short accountability and visibility. This is what you want. You want this level of intensity and immediacy of focus on your customers if change is going to happen. Change will be the toughest of all tasks to make happen; simply writing a check for software will not make this happen, but accountability, transparency and commitments made and kept to customers will.
Sometimes when industry experts write about VoC programs they call this area defining "touch points" but I argue it has to be more than that. It has to be a person with a problem at your customer who needs you to solve it, and if they have that problem chances are other customers of yours do too. That's the beginning of a solid VoC program. Where CRM software fits into all this is once you find the execution level of your customers, software gives you the opportunity to track what's working and what isn't. Software will not make you more accountable; relationships definitely will. Software will make it easier to track how well you keep commitments and how the relationships, over time, are progressing.
Third, make it a practice to spend time, in person, with customers' contacts responsible for day-to-day execution and see how they are measured on quality. This is the pivot point of revolutionizing quality with customer relationships. Instead of measuring the many quality assurance, quality control and quality management systems in your company through the use of what tend to become very myopic and inward centered lenses, go out and spend time with those technicians, analysts, engineers and managers who rely on your company to deliver quality. Understand how they are measured, what matters to them in their jobs, figure out how they can better integrate to your company's quality control and management processes, and how your company can better integrate to them. Realize that in the end it is in your service to them that quality management, strategies and initiatives in your company state relevant. One may argue that the role of quality is always secure, yet I argue that unless quality serves customers it is not fulfilling its full potential to impact the health and growth of any organization.
Fourth, create a dashboard based on how your quality impacts your customers' operations, stressing collaboration over individual performance. What needs to happen in this step is a dashboard of metrics needs to emerge that is based on what matters most to your customers and how they are measured on the quality of products and services you deliver to them. Focus on metrics that measure collaboration across your company and theirs, and share the dashboard and its results with customers. Create a portal where customers can see your performance relative to their requirements. This is the essence of how Partner Relationship Management (PRM) began for companies serving their indirect channels, yet from the quality perspective it can be so much more than just leads and tracking sales activity, which is where PRM ended up from a growth trajectory standpoint. Instead focus on this portal as a transparent view of how you are performing relative to their expectations. Clearly each customer would have their own dedicated portal yet the metrics could be common enough across your customer base so that only a single set of measures could be provided.
Now this is an area where CRM software is greatly increasing the level of performance for many organizations in getting analytics created, maintained, and securely published online via portals. While quality management departments have used statistics and analytics as the foundation of audits, strategies and initiatives for decades, the use of these techniques has experienced exponential growth in marketing departments globally. With a much higher level of expectations on marketing departments, the reliance on analytics has become one of the most rapidly growing areas of CRM software. The good news for quality management professionals is the fact that many of the applications and tools needed for creating the dashboards recommended in this article are already available.
There's no need however to look at an enterprise-class level of CRM applications; instead look at many of the hosted and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers including Salesforce.com which minimize the up-front costs of getting up and running with customer-facing analytics. Quality Departments are doing this today, and also using the customer management portions of the program to track how audits are completed, the results of audits, and the capturing of significant customer requirements. One aerospace and defense manufacturer chooses to have one of their quality assurance directors produce a deck of slides using Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint, taking nearly four days a month to do this. This director knows the processes so well he has Excel macros running to get the data, all that is needed to automate this is integration to an analytics application and slight customization and a dashboard in Salesforce.com could save this person 28 to 30 hours a month easily.
Fifth, pick only those metrics of quality performance that are easily quantified and show collaboration between you and your customer on quality issues. Go through an iterative cycle of defining these key performance indicators (KPIs) or metrics of performance with your customers. Get a series of dashboards up based on conversation with them and run through a series of data loads to see if the dashboards are reflecting what your customers are seeing. In short look to build a common set of expectations with your customers and find out how the KPIs and metrics can be better shown. Look to go through a system implementation phase if you will with the dashboard; don't just do a one-and-done on this part of your VoC program. Instead focus not on the accomplishment of just getting this done, but focus instead on how to bring change into your organization by being of more focused and hopefully more relevant service to your customers through the metrics delivered.
Sixth, meet regularly in person to review performance versus expectations on both metrics and on overall execution. Again focusing on those who are responsible for executing initiatives and strategies at your company and how you are serving them through the quality of your products and services, it's always a good idea to meet in person and see how things are going. Going over the dashboard is just part of the discussion, and the need for coordinating on new product introductions, changes to pricing on key products and services, the development cycles on new products and their delivery cycles that may potentially impact their business, and many more issues all need to be covered in these discussions. Face time is critical for change to happen, both on your side as well as theirs. Think of this as a regular audit of how your organization, from a quality management standpoint, is fulfilling the needs of customers. Quantifying your company's contribution to customers' quality goals and objectives will quickly yield your strengths and weaknesses as an organization as well.
Seventh, create improvement projects to turn quality weaknesses into strengths, and publish the schedule of these improvement projects on the customer portals. Focus on what can reasonably be changed, and realize that changing how people work will take inordinately longer than simply changing a product or simple, relatively isolated process. The critical point of these improvement projects is how to increase quality in the three most critical areas of any organization: people, processes, and products. Focus on how your customers and your quality management organization and functional areas can align and partner with each other, focusing on how quality can become a competitive advantage for them, based on your products. Once this happens based on turning quality management weaknesses into strengths, lasting change can happen and best of all, VoC programs will have paid off.
Summary and Conclusion Software can never deliver the intensity and focus that many organizations need for lasting change to happen, it has to first happen at a very individual, very personal level while at the same time showing the major positive impacts on company-wide financial performance. VoC programs are critical for quality management departments to get away from being too myopic on their own metrics and getting focused on what matters most, which are the metrics their customers rely on. The bottom line is that only after these processes and the commitments of people are in place can CRM software contribute to making lasting change happen. Quality management in the end is only as relevant as the service and contribution it makes to customers outside an organization.
Revolutionizing Product Quality With Stronger Customer Relationships
Louis Columbus is a member of the Cincom Manufacturing Business Solutions Team and a former senior analyst with AMR Research. He has worked with enterprise clients on defining solutions to their channel management, order management and service life cycle management strategies. Mr. Columbus also teaches graduate-level international business and marketing courses at Webster-Loyola Marymount University and University of California, Irvine. He is the author of fifteen books on technology and two books on analyst relations. His book, Getting Results from your Analyst Relations Strategies, can be downloaded for free.
