Thinking Beyond Design Specifications: A March Towards Excellence in Customer Satisfaction

Abstract

Modi Xerox, a member of the Rank Xerox group of companies (UK) and a leading copier manufacturer in the country, was faced with a chronic field failure problem of blurred patterns in one of their popular copier models. A field failure always leads to customer dissatisfaction. Customers expect a 100% fault-free reproduction from a copier machine on a continuous basis. Poor copy quality is always a source of irritation to customers. Customers feel dissatisfied when they observe a blurred pattern (skips) which cannot be read. The company observed this problem of blurred patterns at a rate of from one to 12 per 100 copies in their Model (X). Symptoms of this problem were first observed in August 1987. Thereafter, several efforts of a trial and error nature were made for resolving this problem, but none of them gave any satisfactory solution. Webster, part of the Xerox corporation, also confirmed the existence of the problem and that no solution was known worldwide. Thinking beyond the specification gave a solution to the problem. The new design has yielded a saving of 11.4 million rupees (US$380K) by reducing number of breakdown calls and in-house trouble shooting costs. Excellence in customer satisfaction was accomplished.