Transformation of an organization's business processes towards customer centricity through quality control and assurance tools

Abstract

Customer centricity is imposed on organizations as a managerial norm, while the quality management toolkit through which this norm is implemented remains tuned to conformity control at the process output rather than to the prevention of deviation at the point of contact with the customer. The study rests on an author's model of a mid-sized service and production organization whose customer circuit consists of fourteen end-to-end business processes. For each process a customer centricity index has been computed as a weighted convolution of four measurable attributes, among them the share of control points preceding the handover of the result and the speed at which customer feedback returns into the process. The cost of poor quality for 2023—2026 has been decomposed by the chain substitution method into the factors of service volume, defect rate and unit cost of correction; the defect rate factor has been further decomposed. Processes with the lowest rework share, billing and payment allocation, receive the lowest index values, 0.587 and 0.557 against a circuit average of 0.717, because control in them is concentrated at the output. The index increment when the number of control points rises from one to two reaches 0.118 and roughly halves at each subsequent step. Of the 10.1 million rubles reduction in the cost of poor quality, within the defect rate factor 62.5% stems from moving control towards the beginning of the process and 25.3% from increasing the number of control points. It follows that the customer centricity of a process is determined by the position of control, whereas its density exhibits diminishing returns: reconfiguring the placement of existing control points yields an effect unattainable by multiplying them, and the transformation of the customer circuit therefore belongs to the tasks of control topology.