15 September 2018 was an important deadline for our customers belonging to the automotive supplier industry, since the QMS standard ISO/TS 16949 ceased to be valid on this day. Instead the new standard IATF 16949:2016 came into force. In order to provide the greatest possible support to employees, all new requirements for quality management in the IATF standard have been implemented in SMARTCRM.
Customer requirements
According to the IATF standard, customer requirements as well as information related to the product monitoring obligation have to be documented in the quality management system. SMARTCRM enables this easily when creating a visit report. After a customer visit, the sales employees can then use selection fields to identify whether requirements such as delivery reliability, quality, technical advice, etc., have been met or not. The company can freely define which requirements are to be displayed and documented and also store these in the CRM system itself. When calling up a customer file, the CRM solution shows the status of the customer’s requirements at a glance. Red and green markings also improve the overview.
If following another customer visit, a new visit report is documented in SMARTCRM, the customer requirements are preset with the values of the previous report and can be updated if needed.
Unfulfilled customer requirements result in adequate measures. Given that these must be documented and implemented, SAMRTCRM automatically sends a corresponding task to the responsible employee for unfulfilled customer requirements. An overview of all resulting tasks and appointments in the visit report completes the panoramic view.
Product monitoring obligation
The information stored by the sales employees in the framework of the product monitoring obligation are similarly defined in the CRM system and displayed in the IATF visit report. The employees can then document in no time whether there are market problems for their own parts or the similar ones of the competition for instance. In this case, an alert message is sent to all persons in charge – for example the sales management or the employee responsible of the quality assurance.
Evaluations
Both customer requirements and product monitoring can be evaluated in SMARTCRM. For example, overviews show the employees in charge right on the start screen of the CRM solution, the SMART Board, the most recent visit reports as well as the reports that generated an alert notice. Moreover, all the measures still to be processed are visible at a glance.
This is how SMARTCRM guarantees to all those responsible an overview of all information required for successful quality management and compliance with IATF standard 16949: 2016.
