When customers complain  

Complaints are nothing to be angry about. On the contrary: Complaints can deepen the customer relationship. It's no secret that a customer whose problem has been solved professionally and to his full satisfaction by his service provider often becomes an all the more loyal customer. However, this presupposes that the service provider, i.e. you as a business partner, has a process for handling complaints. It is also important to keep an eye on the costs.

Quality Management (QM) in practiceIn 

Especially in industrial companies, especially those with discrete manufacturing, there are big differences, because every company manufactures differently. Whether individual, series or variant production: the result is almost always an individual product. This also means that the complaint process is also highly individual and depends on the respective product, the type of production and many other conditions.

In addition, there are many different events that can lead to a complaint. They can originate from customers, be necessary towards suppliers or within the own company. The most typical examples are usually that a customer received a delivery from you too late, incomplete or even with defects. Returns, subsequent deliveries, price discounts and the like could be imagined as reactions on your part. But that's not all: Although you can satisfy your customer in the short term by making such concessions, you should get to the bottom of the problem and clarify why the delivery was late or incorrect. QM methods, such as the 8D problem solving method, which systematically finds both the cause and a solution, can help here. This means that the "complaint" process often has a direct influence on the entire production and delivery process.

Complaint processes belong in the SAP system
Precisely because complaints processes can be extensive and have an influence on various other processes in the company, it is highly recommended that they be mapped in the SAP system. In this way, you can ensure the high quality of your deliveries and services and ultimately the satisfaction of your customers. For the same reasons, however, this is not so easy: precisely because complaints are handled individually and widely ramified QM processes have become established over the years, the transfer to SAP is a real challenge. 

There is a practicable solution if you orientate yourself on the 8D process. From numerous projects of this kind, we have developed a kind of best-practices standardization that can be easily adapted and extended. The basis is a pre-set process with a predefined master data framework. For each notification type, quality costs from all areas of the company can be displayed - this makes it easier to understand the quality assurance processes and makes them rule-based. An 8D report can be generated during all project phases. 

With the Sycor solution we can support you in two ways: On the one hand, we provide a basic framework that already contains many process steps typical for complaints. This framework is QM-compliant and designed in a way that it can be easily integrated with other company processes. On the other hand, it is so flexible that individual requirements can also be implemented. With a manageable amount of effort, you can design your own complaints processes and seamlessly integrate them with all other SAP processes. This is the only way that complaints lead to particularly satisfied customers and improvements in the overall process.