PROPOSED: CONCEPT OF OPERATION

Roy E. Roebuck Copyright Roy E. Roebuck

P.O. Box 4346 Arlington, VA, May 1993.

Falls Church, VA 22044-0346 Released into the public domain.

Ph: 703-905-1846 Internet: RoebuckR@tmn.com

My proposal is that all organizations be perceived as unified entities, each a single system with a single process. That single process has satisfaction of customer requirements as its purpose, with an output of "measured customer satisfaction that exceeds their expectations, continuously". This proposal would apply regardless of the characteristics of the organization and its environment.

Continuous improvement is at the heart of any quality enterprise. By focusing on the customer requirement, an organization is drawn toward continuous improvement, because the customers expect always higher quality products (goods and services) as time passes.

The core of this proposed corporate top-level activity and concept of operation is the Customer and their requirement(s), as satisfied by the Supplier, the organization.

The first phase of an organization's customer-focused activity measures current customer satisfaction with their environment, including those products provided by the organization itself.

The customer needs which fall into the organization's mission area are considered potential requirements. Regardless of the customer's source for meeting these needs, it is up to the organization to focus on satisfing these needs if they fall within its mission area. With aggressive efforts at "Exceeding Customer Expectations", the organization will evolve toward being the "Supplier of Choice" of its entire potential customer base.

The following ideas and terms provide a start point to begin focusing on the customer.

A key point in keeping a customer-focus: we all play a part in a long supplier/customer chain of activity. No customer willingly pays for something they don't receive/want. Each organization's responsibility is to eliminate those activities from its production processes that provide no significant direct or indirect value for its customers, members, management and suppliers. Elimination of wasteful activity results when production processes begin with customer requirements and expectations.

One benefit of customer-focus from a supplier (operational) perspective is the continuous reduction of transaction cycle time. The supplier responds more quickly to customer demand and adapts to changes in the environment, saving time and money in mission performance. This reflects the principle of accomplishing the mission (effective operations) while conserving resources (efficient operations).

This diagram displays a sample matrix that an organization may use to survey its customer base for their degree of product satisfaction in relation to various organizational customer focus areas.

This diagram outlines what could become the top-level "node tree" of an IDEF0 Activity Model in a customer-focused enterprise. IDEF0 and IDEF1X (Data) models for implementing and maintaining this customer-focused process are available on request. These models are not absolute "right answers" for an organization. They provide a possible start point for initial engineering or reengineering of the enterprise.

The previous supplier/customer model is expanded here. It emphasizes the spiral-life-cycle of continuous quality improvement, with the customer at the center. This displays a cycle of improvement and the importance of an enterprise culture (the arrows) open to managed change. Critical to the open culture of a customer-focused enterprise is effective and efficient informing, involving, and coordinating methods (the flow within the arrows).

An organization can build an informing/involving/coordinating system (e.g., a locator) from the idea shown here. This information system supports management of these entities, their relationships, and the life cycle of resource requirements associated with them. This information system thus supports organizational creation and maintainance of an enterprise which is customer-focused and continuously improving.

Any enterprise must answer questions such as these, singly or in combination, as quickly and fully as possible, to reduce production time and cost. Decisions result from asking and examining such questions.

The underlying information of an enterprise would resemble the following seven categories of enterprise entities, or object classes. Building and maintaining a system displaying dynamic relationships between these object classes would deliver significant useful information to the enterprise. Each phase of implementing such an informing/involving/coordinating system, as shown below, would benefit the organization.

An effective informing/involving/coordinating system would consist of a catalog of managed objects (things of interest to the organization management and its members, suppliers, and customers), and a cross index showing the relationships between these objects, (e.g., the relationship(s) between location(s) such as cities (.01.) and an organization's offices (.02.).

Additional functionality is later added to the system. The system becomes the "Table of Contents" and "Index" of the organization's Activities/Processes in the "Body" of the organization's "Book". It can serve the organization and its customers as an entry point to shared software, data, and information.

The organization can subsequently extend this system to build a complete resource management and accounting capability for managing the life cycle of customer requirements.

This system provides organization management, members, suppliers, and customers with a single entry point for managing the life cycle of a customer's requirement. It supports: initial conceptualization; building a request from a catalog of available products or new product ideas; request approval; approval authorization; authorization allocation; allocated development, procurement, and fielding; final assignment, and assigned-product sustainment, continuous adjustment of data, and continous reporting.

Displayed here are principal models which an organization can apply as customer-focus logos. Using these logos in briefings and literature can help the organization communicate to management, members, suppliers, and customers its commitment to continuous quality improvement, and can help them understand their context and importance in the organization's operation.