Inside Satisfaction

At work in my company’s packaging department, supervisors assign the task of making ready-to-use boxes out of cardboard flats to one person at the start of every shift. All this person does for 12 hours is make certain that the five or six packaging lines, which don’t have automatic box-making machines, are properly supplied with boxes. This usually entails converting roughly 5 thousand flats into usable boxes.

By supplying these lines with boxes, the box-maker is serving the needs of his or her customers, which in this example are internal. And in order for my company to reach total quality, it must place equal importance on satisfying these internal customers as it does on its external customers, who are, of course, the consumers who purchase the final product in retail stores.

Poorly made boxes can cause the product to fall out and get scrapped. Failing to supply these boxes in a timely manner can cause unnecessary down time. Both cases in point cut into company profits. Customers…both external and internal…are the judges of quality.