Читать книгу Lean Six Sigma For Dummies - Martin Brenig-Jones - Страница 57

All of your processes are likely to involve other people. There will be people involved in the different steps of the process. They may be members of your team or department, but could also be in other departments or functions. There will also be people who provide the inputs you need to start the work — for example, information, perhaps a schedule of available products, or an approved order. These are your suppliers. There will be people who receive the outputs of your process. These are your customers. Suppliers and customers could be internal (from inside your organization) or external (from outside your organization), or both!

Knowing who the internal customers and suppliers are, and how they fit into the picture, is important because together they form the end-to-end process, the value stream that ultimately provides the external customer with the service or product they’re looking for.

Consider Figure 3-2. Department A produces output for Department B, which produces output for Department C, which provides the answer to an external customer enquiry. Each of these departments is involved in the process and needs to understand the objectives of the “big process” or overall system.

© Martin Brenig-Jones and Jo Dowdall

FIGURE 3-2: Identifying your internal customers.

All too often, departments work in a vacuum, doing their own thing without regard for its impact on the end-to-end process. They may have their own targets, measures and priorities, for example. Possibly, the end-to-end process or value stream isn’t even known; each team or department involved works as though their step in the process is independent of any others. In reality, the end-to-end process is a series of interdependent steps, and the overall system is made up of a series of processes.

Internal customers and suppliers must understand their relationship and how their different roles contribute to “the bigger picture.” If they don’t, the external customers will receive poor service or product — the very people who should be viewed as the most important because they’re paying the organization for the services or products they provide.

Even if you’re not directly dealing with the external customer, you’re quite likely to be dealing with someone who is. So, understanding the bigger picture is important, and meeting the requirements of your internal customers could well be the key to successfully meeting the external customers’ CTQs. Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is helpful here. QFD establishes a clear link between each process requirement and the end customer, making it easier for each employee to see the role that they play in meeting customer requirements. We cover QFD in Chapter 14.