Motorola’s Total Customer Satisfaction (TCS) Teams are cross-functional teams that use customer-focused methods to solve quality and process problems. One TCS Team success story involved an international supplier with quality and delivery problems. These problems required additional order expediting and rework and were causing customer dissatisfaction. The TCS Team’s report to management disclosed the following:

• By evaluating and revising the product’s design with input from the international supplier, the team created a more robust finished product.

• The team’s adoption of process capability studies, together with continuous monitoring, resulted in improved quality for the international supplier.

• When sourcing was moved to a local supplier, the number of times the inventory turned over annually improved. It went from 26 to 52 times a year.

• Over the three-year life of the product, the team’s changes resulted in $831,438 in cost savings.

1. From the TCS Team’s report, identify the key issues involved in solving the international supplier’s quality and process problems.

2. How could the team have applied the process-based techniques of benchmarking and process mapping to improve quality?