External customer

A company rendering services in NDT for internal or external customers shall establish and improve the testing quality through management of processes and their interaction. 

In order to estabUsh this type of service, the maintenance management should meet often with their outside suppHer as weU as with their iaside customers to benefit the end user the external customers. During these meetings the foUowiag steps should be taken to assure nonstop quahty Hsten to the customers, work with customers to clarify expectations, identify measurable iadicators, exceed expectations, deUver products and services when customers need them, keep promises, design for ease of use, constandy improve, focus improvements on areas related to customer expectations, and respond quickly (5). 

Finally, the laboratory expends significant effort communicating results to both internal and external customers. Production, quaUty assurance, and purchasing all have various information needs ranging from the simple pass /fail decisions to statistical summaries of the data and suppHer product quahty. Customers expect to receive lot analyses in the form of a COA and often also want their own product-specific information on the document as well. This information can automatically be appHed to the COA if entered into the LIMS. Often, a quaUty-conscious customer wants information about the product in the form of process capabiUty or control charts. Using LIMS, these charts can be provided on demand. 

Failure costs - Internal failure costs are essentially the cost of failures identified and rectified before the final product gets to the external customer, such as rework, scrap, design changes. External failure costs include product recall, warranty and product liability claims. 

TQM involves all the organizations, all the functions, the external suppliers, the external customers and involves the quality policy. Similarly, TQM cannot be achieved without good Quality Management Systems (QMS) which bring together all functions relevant to the product, providing policies, procedures and documentation. The elements of a quality organization consist of these three mutually dependent items (Field and Swift, 1996) ... 

It is common when adopting the TQM philosophy to regard all human interfaces as customer-supplier interfaces. When executed wisely this can have a beneficial effect on internal efficiency and effectiveness, but there are pitfalls to avoid. In a customer-supplier chain, the expectations of the external customer can be modified with each transaction, as illustrated in Figure 1.2. 

In the upper diagram each supplier individually interprets the customer s requirements and either imposes additional requirements or neglects to pass on requirements. The net result at the end of the chain is that the external customer (the one who buys from the organization) does not get satisfaction from the transaction. In the lower diagram, each supplier refers back to the external customer s requirements to calibrate the internal customer s demands. This ensures that the net result matches exactly what the customer ordered. In reality, such calibration should not be necessary if the internal customers demonstrate traceability to external customer requirements. This can be achieved through process reviews performed in each process before instructions are transmitted to subsequent processes. 

Designs exclusively owned by the supplier and not sponsored by an external customer. 

Information processing in production scheduling is essentially the same as in planning. Both plants and individual process equipment take orders and make products. For a plant, the customer is usually external, but for a process (or work cell in discrete manufacturing parlance), the order comes from inside the plant or factory. In a plant, the final product can be sold to an external customer for a process, the product delivered is an intermediate or partially finished product that goes on to the next stage of processing (internal customer). 

An internal customer is a member of the organization, which is part of the process and imderlakes the performance of a specific task. The ""supplier" to this internal customer is again a member of the organization that transfers his/her product or service to the next member of the chain (his/her customer). To do things ""right first time" and on time, and achieve (external) customer satisfaction the internal supphers and internal customers must always work in perfect coordination. 

Measurement of customer satisfaction (internal and external customers) as well as financial factors should also be considered. This may be based on customer surveys. Such surveys should include, and not limited to laboratory services, customer complaints, reject and reanalysis costs, measures of the time to complete an analysis or delay time to release a batch etc. 

As site services and infrastructure made the transition first to bundled services units and then in some cases even to separate independent service companies, they were faced with the need to significantly professionalize the way in which they rendered services to both internal and external customers. 

Internal customer contact External customer contact Creation/revision date Job description summary Essential duties and responsibilities Supervisory responsibilities Qualification requirements Education and/or experience Language skills Mathematical skills Reasoning ability... 

A company truly committed to meeting or exceeding internal and external customer satisfaction should perform an evaluation in an effort to benchmark each key department. The QAunit would be a good starting point since it is the center of most company activity. 

Hosting external customer audits within the company provides an opportunity for information interchange. 

Similarly, customers are traditionally classified into confusing or misleading categories—internal customers, external customers, partners, patients, clients, patrons, guests, fans, and so on. In reality, all customers can be simply defined based on their role as an end user, a broker, or a. fixer. 

RW Vachet, SW McElvany. Application of external customized waveforms to a commercial quadrupole ion trap. J Am Soc Mass Spectrom 10 355—359, 1999. 

The Product Design Report can be a very useful document to focus the company on developing the right product at the right time to the market. Of course, to be of value it is essential that the correct input has been obtained from internal and external customers. For this to happen, a pharmaceutical company s senior management has to support this approach and ensure that time and resources are allowed for the design phase activities. The most successful pharmaceutical companies are effectively using this approach. 

Generally speaking, a business process is a continuous series of enterprise activities, undertaken for the purpose of creating output. The starting point and final product of the business process are the output requested and utilized by corporate or external customers. Business processes often enable the value chain of the enterprise as well as focusing on the customer when the output is created. 

The value-based approach presumes that quality can be defined in terms of costs and prices. Garvin (1984b, p. 28) uses the following example to clarify this perspective [A] 500 running shoe, no matter how well constructed, could not be a quality product, for it would find few buyers. Reeves and Bednar (1994) emphasize that this definition of quality forces firms to concentrate on internal efficiency ( internal conformance to specifications ) and external effectiveness ( the extent to which external customer expectations are met ). However, this approach mixes two distinct, though related, concepts quality and value (Reeves and Bednar 1994). Because of its hybrid nature, this concept lacks definitional clarity and might result in incompatible designs when implemented in practice. 

The customer satisfaction measurement system must connect to the internal measures of a company and to external customer evaluations. To provide evidence, surveys can be performed to make possible a gap analysis (the gap is the difference between what the customer should experience and what the customer actually experiences). The data of actual-to-expected performance allow the application of advanced statistic techniques such as regression analysis to determine empirically the relative impact and/or importance of attributes and processes to customer satisfaction (the power of this technique and an example of its application are illustrated in Anton [1996]). To improve customer satisfaction, identifying the specific attributes and processing the most predictive of customer satisfaction decisions alxtut investment of resources will yield the greatest benefit. 

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