qMindset.com – the quality management portal

CQM and the focus of the customer is a section of the Total Quality Management (TQM) principles, and also a part of a company’s Quality Management System (QMS) . The standard of ISO 9001 emphasizes how important it is to focus on customer satisfaction.

Maintaining comprehensive Customer Quality Management (CQM) in an organization is a key factor to achieve long-term success. In short, CQM is the expression of a company’s customer focus. Without the management of customer quality the customer has no counter-part to communicate with (in terms of quality), no one tracks customer quality performance and satisfaction, and in general, no one manages issues related to the customer. Customer Quality Management is also an extensive approach and strategy, using a broad array of activities, quality expertise and tool-set to ensure that the organization delivers products and services fitting to the customer’s expectations.

Key Features

In a top-notch organization, the department responsible for customer quality management also serves as the party, which represents the customer’s voice, not just during the
design phases, but during the whole product life-cycle.

Depending on the organizational layout CQM is sometimes merged with internal manufacturing quality, but it varies company to company. There are multinational corporates, where
project quality is also integrated with customer quality, while some others divide it into two separate roles.

The following chart gives a brief overview about the position of CQM in the organization.

CQM in the organization (Source: qMindset.com)

Generally, direct communication channels exist between the customers and some internal stakeholders (sales, logistics, project management, development department), while
many other departments do not communicate directly with the customer (e.g. manufacturing, supplier quality management, etc.). In the latter case, the interface is clearly the CQM, so it needs to lead the
communication into one channel.

The key roles and responsibilities of customer quality management:

• Being the single-channel customer interface for quality.
• Enhancement and tracking of customer satisfaction.
• Representing the voice of the customer among the stakeholders of the organization.
• Protecting the customer from non-conforming products with the tools of quality planning, control and improvement.
• Active support of project management and development during the product- and process development phases (e.g. customer expectations and requirements,
  FMEA, quality planning, etc.).
• Managing initial sampling towards the customers (e.g. PPAP, EMPB, etc.).
• Customer related change management (ECN, ECR).
• Process owner of claim handling and incident management in case of issues affecting the customer.
• Risk management, concessions.
• Contact for 3rd party accredited certification bodies (e.g. for ISO 9001).
• Organizing internal audits.
• Key contact and leading role for process audits performed by the customer.
• Tracking of customer quality metrics (e.g. incidents, 0km and field issues).
• Reporting customer quality information to the management and affected stakeholders.

Thanks to the extensive presence, CQM is in frequent contact with almost all internal stakeholders. A proper customer quality engineer is in the swim concerning the running
projects, knowns what’s happening in the production area, is familiar with the actual logistics situation, and many more. Thus the knowledge of the processes of all joint departments is necessary for the everyday
success.

Based on general roles of customer quality management, it has a systematic frame of tools and methods, many of them are overlapping other quality fields.

As a concrete example, the knowledge of the following tools and methods is essential for a customer quality engineer, to be successful in the automotive industry:

CQM should generally track the same quality metrics as the customer does, such as 0km and field warranty claims in ppm, occasion of service campaigns and incidents, process
audit results.

A major task of customer quality engineers is claim management (see Global 8D ). With the involvement of the warranty analysis lab and the possible causing parties, the CQE leads the root cause investigation. The areas of defect sources can be:

• Supplier failure.
• Manufacturing (process) failure.
• Design failure.
• Logistic failure.

It might happen, that the part is conforming to the specification, and the failure symptom was generated by the customer, though he does not know it. This can happen
especially in complex systems (e.g. interaction of electrical units). It is a good example why the responsible customer quality engineer needs to have good communication skills, to find the solution for
such an issue together with the customer.

Source: qMindset.com