Your boss should not decide what you do (internal customers, specifications and KPI's)

Keeping your customer happy is a key goal for a business that wants to outperform their competition. When your department is at the start or middle of the supply chain, or even your own complex manufacturing process, the wishes of the final customer are often difficult to translate to your own processes. That's why within larger production chains we speak about internal customers, who decide the specifications you produce to and are just as important to you as the final customer for the entire business.

As they say, "customer is king"... but they're not your boss - or at least not your manager. Your manager will almost never be your internal customer. The internal customer is the next step in the supply chain (or maybe for a support department like finance, operations and commercial are their internal customers). So don't confuse hitting output goals or production effectiveness with internal specifications.

Specifications determine the requirements for the product. They determine the line between a good product and a defect.
Process standards are all those settings, ways of working and material specifications you set on your inputs that together make the process of producing your product to specification as effective as possible.
KPI's are the descriptors of your processes' effectiveness, cost, etc. This is what many managers are most interested in, and they are important - your business will only be profitable if you produce efficiently enough. But they're not requirements for production, they are the result.

To build up a good manufacturing management system, you need clear specifications for end products and semi-finished goods, for the result from each step in the manufacturing chain basically. Your operation should always be producing up to specs, that's your first goal. This should be done in a safe way (I know, safety first and all, but that's only on a minute to minute scale - your company can be the safest in the world but when you don't deliver on specifications you've got no future at all). And then we look at how effectively we can do this. Process standards are the tool to roll out your most effective processes and sustain proven best performance levels.
#continuousimprovement #KPI #specifications

Видео Your boss should not decide what you do (internal customers, specifications and KPI's) канала Tom Mentink