Quality Progress

With billions of vendors selling their items on Amazon, many consumers rely on reviews to guide their purchasing decisions. And just one bad review—or no reviews—can significantly affect a product’s sales. Manufacturers are beginning to realize that product reviews are a powerful key performance indicator (KPI).

What are some other new or nontraditional KPIs and what do they measure?

I did a web search and found a few sites with a breadth of examples.  


They seem to follow two key themes:

- Pathway to the initial order or purchase

- Service provided for an inquiry or complaint


The KPIs measure time, frequency, quantity, and outcomes.  These have to trace back to the original strategies and goals.  For example, if First Call Resolution is a goal, then the KPI should indicate the percentage or ratios of calls resolved at the first point of contact.


Basili presented his Goal-Question-Metric model to link metrics back to goals.  A similar methodology could be applied to like KPIs to key strategies.

I work in a high-volume, raw component industry where certain defect types remain inherent in our processes. Downstream inspection and lot sampling is therefore necessary to achieve our customers’ quality expectations. Traditional KPI’s such as Customer-reported DPPM show us our customers’ view of our delivered quality, but they don’t tell us how we got there. Did we produce fewer defects? Or did we do a better job of sorting and inspecting downstream?
By combining our quality data into a new KPI called Quality Control Effectiveness (QCE), we can now determine how effective our sorting and sampling processes are at shielding our customers from our production processes’ failings.
QCE = (Total Defects Found Internally) / (Total Defects Found Internally + Customer-reported Defects)
In a given time period if our customers report finding 600 defects and our internal sorting efforts cull out 32,000 defects. Our QCE then equals (32,000) / (32,000 + 600) = 98.2%. In other words, 98.2% of our total defects were detected internally.
Like all KPI’s, tracking QCE can reveal clues about your processes you may not see otherwise. A downward trending QCE for instance may indicate an evolving product mix containing more difficult to detect defects.