The beginning of a new year ushers in the opportunity to plan for the future and set new goals and objectives which everyone will work towards achieving over the next twelve months. Our team at Birk is well known for having high aspirations and expectations and we’re constantly seeking a new challenge to conquer. That being said, this is always an exciting time of year at Birk Manufacturing and one that is full of much anticipation and enthusiasm.
This year Birk has selected to target our company wide quality objectives as the main event for our twelve month heavy weight battle. We have increased our weekly on time fill rate (OTFR) goal from above 90% to above 95%. For this objective we track how well we respond to our customer demand, not how well we perform against what we determined as our target ship date based on current workload and inventory supplies. If a customer calls Birk and requests to have their order in three days when our current lead time is two to three weeks, we use the three day request when calculating our metric. We feel this calculation better portrays how well we serve our valued customers.
Furthermore, we also track the how well we fulfill customer demand without shipping any defective or non-conforming product. We track this using our monthly defect-free OTFR which takes the average OTFR for the past month and calculates it against our returns percentage for that same month. This year our goal for monthly defect-free OTFR has been increased from above 85% to above 93%. Other quality objectives include reduction of scrap, reduction of orders returned, zero full orders returned, and zero lost-time due to safety. Now that we have our new goals and objectives for 2012…let the battle begin!
Happy New Year!
Carleton Birk
Quality Assurance Manager