Are you listening to "Voice of Customer"?

With the popularity of Six Sigma, Voice of Customer became the buzzword in the corporate world. The concept of voice of customer was so easy that even top executives could understand and apply it.

Voice of customer is listening to the customers needs and adapting the product/service to accommodate those needs. However, lately I have seen that the customer needs go unheard and business continues as usual.
I was returning my rental car a couple weeks ago and the lady at the counter asked me "How was everything?" My response was "not good" and I told the lady about the problems I had. One of the tires was running low so I had to check the tire pressure, the heater did not work properly. The lady said all these problems were related to the car and not with the service. I was stunned by her reaction. I managed to tell her that isn't the car part of the service and as a customer shouldn't I get a reliable, clean vehicle accompanied with good service?

Here I was sharing my experience as a customer and all the rental company agent should have done is listened to me and then act on it. Instead the customers voice was totally ignored and business continued as usual.
Many businesses today ignore what customers are telling. Are such businesses really listening to the "Voice of their customers"? It will be interesting to see how these businesses perform in the future.

"Have a minute" meetings...not so lean!

My coworker walks up to my desk and says "Do you have a minute, I need to talk to you about something important". He begins to talk about the great deal he got on the Christmas present he bought.
I get interrupted several times during the day by coworkers, people from other departments asking for stuff they need. Being in an open office culture, I have to entertain such requests.

These days many meetings start this way and end up taking more than a few minutes. Even if the actual discussion did not take up much time, you've lost track of what you were doing or thinking. To get back into what you were working on, you need more than a few minutes. Many times you don't remember what you were thinking before you got interrupted.
If the discussion does take a long time, then you've lost time.
In both cases, productivity gets affected.

Most of the times, this meeting may have helped the person who interrupted you. But you did not gain anything from the conversation.
In lean terms, this is waste.

Now you can either choose to be rude and not entertain "have a minute" meetings. Or you can be the nice guy who is ever ready to help everyone anytime. Both these are extreme conditions and have disadvantages.

Couple ways I have tried to prevent interruptions at work are:
1) If you need anything from me and your request can wait, please send me an email.
2) Allocate specific time slots for people to come see me.

I have had some luck with the first approach. Most people in my office have realized that I work on critical stuff that requires me to focus 100%. However, there a few who still cannot stop themselves from coming to my desk the moment they need something.

What's the difference between control limits and specifications?

While covering the topic of control charts for process control in SPC training, I always get very interesting questions.
One of my favorite's is "So, what's the difference between control limits and specifications?"

But in the SPC training I did last week, this one student went to the extent of saying that it is misleading that points out of control limits on the control charts signal problem when there is no problem at all...my parts are within specifications and are good to be shipped to my customer.
I patiently explained what control limits are, how they are calculated and what an out of control point means.
However, this student was just not getting it and was confusing all the other students too. I was surprised when the Quality Manager jumped in the discussion and actually supported this woman who worked in the Quality department for years at this company.

Both of them kinda challenged the basics of control charts and were tending to prove that control limits are not needed on control charts. Instead specification limits should be used.

I explained the difference between control limits and specifications again. Only this time I introduced pre control charts. A comparison of pre control with control charts seemed to make sense to the Quality people.

The use of control charts for identifying special causes in the process and removing them does not seem as important as producing parts that are out of specifications. Sad, but true!
These days, the concept of having a stable process that produces good parts seems to be lost.