Improving Quality with Analytics

Quality is a priority anywhere and everywhere, from the shop floor to the boardroom, in the media and online. Regardless of your quality creed, a common thread seems to weave its way through the fabric of every quality-focused message – the customer. Sam Walton said that the customer is the supreme boss, capable of firing everyone in the company.

History shows that the costs of poor quality can range from 15-40 percent of the cost of goods sold or 10-40 percent of sales. The cost of poor quality can take the form of product rework, returns, complaints, reduced service levels, product recalls, agency fines and litigation to name just a few. This leads to lost revenue caused by reductions in customer retention, missed cross-sell and upsell opportunities, and negative press. Regardless of the metric used, it is hard to ignore such substantial costs.

In today’s digital and connected world, quality is more important than ever and organizations cannot afford the costs of poor quality. We’ve got a great white paper from SAS on customer-driven quality that we thought you’d get value from. This paper is outlines:

• the importance of quality and the cost of poor quality
• social media’s important role in quality and the customer experience
• how you can use SAS Analytics to demystify factors that influence total customer experience
• a phased approach for implementing a customer-driven quality solution
• a vision for the future of analytics in numerous areas of organizations

We hope you find this white paper useful as you implement and refine your own quality initiatives. If you have any questions or would like to discuss this further, please call us at 317.423.9143 x1 or fill out a contact form.

In our last chapter, we reviewed a paper on customer-driven quality that touched on the importance of social media. Regardless of how your company defines quality, it is clear your customers’ perception of your quality overrules all other definitions and has the most influence on their purchasing decisions. Social media has the power to sway this perception for better or worse.

What your customers say and read on social media affects not only their perception of quality, but also their purchasing decisions and what they say to other prospects. That is why it’s critical to understand these perceptions and how they are influenced by social media.

Customer perception may seem less controllable than traditional quality metrics, but it is more accessible than ever and new data is constantly being generated. Your customers are eager to tell the world about their experiences, and prospective customers are searching for those insights.

Social media has an undeniable and strong influence over your customers’ perception of quality. We have a great white paper from SAS on the impact of social media and how you can leverage it to positively impact customers’ perception of quality. This paper is outlines:

• how to harness social media data and integrate it into your issue detection process for earlier warnings and prioritization of product issues.
• the benefits of blending social media data with government databases and other internal data sources.
• analytic techniques you can use to filter out noise and isolate the signals to make more accurate decisions and understand sentiment trends.
• how to integrate social media analytics with your current quality strategy.

We hope you find this white paper useful as you implement and refine your own business improvement initiatives. If you have any questions or would like to discuss this further, please call us at 317.423.9143 x1 or fill out a contact form.

In our previous chapters, you read about how customers drive and impact quality through their experiences and perceptions. Now we’d like to share with you a research report from SAS conducted by LNS research that outlines the tools and insights required to lead a quality transformation.

Recent advances in connectivity, mobility, analytics, scalability, and data have brought on Industry 4.0, digitizing operations and resulting in transformations across departments and businesses. This LNS research report found industry leaders put quality improvement and monitoring among their top use cases because quality advancements are closely aligning quality management with Industry 4.0 to enable enterprise efficiencies, performance, innovation and business models.

This report provides you with the tools and insights required to lead a transformation at your company. This report:

• Defines Quality 4.0 and the related technologies.
• Explains how they transform people and processes.
• Reviews existing concrete accomplishments by peers.
• Provides guidance to enable the transition from traditional quality to Quality 4.0.

We hope you find this report useful as you implement and refine your own quality improvement initiatives. If you have any questions or would like to discuss this further, please call us at 317.423.9143 x1 or fill out a contact form.

In our previous chapters, we explored how customers drive quality, the impact of social media on quality perception, and the tools needed to lead a quality transformation. When we think about quality, the same principles that apply to products also apply to services. For some companies – such as financial institutions – their services are their products, and ensuring quality services has the same importance and impact as ensuring quality products.

Let’s look at an example.

We’ve got a great white paper from SAS that dives into how banks can balance demand for high-quality service and fast access to funds with the need to protect customers and businesses from potential fraud. Using fraud analytics, banks can:

• Evaluate each transaction swiftly and accurately.
• Make better, faster decisions.
• Give honest customers the hassle-free, high-quality service they expect.

We hope you find this white paper inspires ideas for how you can use analytics in your own unique quality initiatives to improve your services and products. If you have any questions or would like to discuss this further, please call us at 317.423.9143 x1 or fill out a contact form.

A lot of our customers came to us with ambitious Quality 4.0 initiatives, but were at a loss of how to start. They knew the pains they needed to address – product defects, customer perception, and process inefficiencies – and they suspected analytics could help, but they didn’t know how to get from where they were to where they wanted to be.

That’s where we came in. With our analytics expertise to help them, our customers were able to eliminate the pains they were facing, making them a hero at their company.

And it all started with SAS/QC® Software, an industry leading quality analytics solution. I’d welcome a chance to hear about what’s on the horizon for your company and help you become the hero of your company’s Quality 4.0 initiatives. If you’re interested in talking further, please feel free to reach out.

In the meantime, I would encourage you to check out the SAS/QC® Software factsheet.

If you have any questions or would like to discuss this further, please call us at 317.423.9143 x1 or fill out a contact form.