Durand Glass Manufacturing Proactively Pursues Corrective Action Best Practices with i-Sight Quality & Complaint Management Software
Homes, restaurants and hotels in dozens of countries around the world rely on quality glassware from trusted names like Luminarc, Arcoroc and Mikasa. Behind those brands is Durand Glass Manufacturing Company (DGMC).
As glass craftsmen, New Jersey-based DGMC carries on a more than 180-year-old tradition established by its parent company, international leader, ARC International Group. Established in 1825 by the Durand family as a traditional glassmaking workshop in Arques, France, ARC now operates worldwide subsidiaries and offices, serving 160 countries. The 100 percent family owned company produces six million items per day and generated 1.2 billion euros in sales in 2004.
ARC and DGCM have built the reputation of their brands, and their businesses, on quality products and customer service. Key to that is following best practices when it comes to managing internal, customer and supplier issues – and taking corrective action to support continuous improvement.
Challenge
In 2006, DGCM determined it needed to pursue corrective action more proactively in four areas: customer complaints, internal processes, safety and supplier issues. At the time, managers across the various departments tracked this information with Excel spreadsheets.
Without a centralized system, employees were not always on the same page about the status of issues, nor did they know which cases took priority over others. In the absence of a workflow guiding them, many closed issues upon resolution – before identifying root causes and counter measures.
“We needed one system to pull together all the different people working across different projects, and to ensure we see everything through to corrective action,” said Jim Peters, process improvement manager at DGCM.
Solution
The company extensively evaluated corrective action solutions and the option of creating its own system in house, even taking the steps of developing a priority matrix with weighted criteria. Topping the wish list: built-in mechanisms for follow-up audits and corrective action; email notification and reminders; ease of use; and reporting/data analysis.
Decision-makers scored products and viewed demos before selecting i-Sight Corrective Action Software (CAPA) for Quality Management from Customer Expressions. The solution outweighed all other commercial products it considered, and the option of creating a system internally.
“i-Sight was far and away the best of the solutions we looked at,” Peters said. “It is much more user friendly than any of the other systems, and had the critical follow-up and reporting capabilities we need to ensure effective corrective action.”
Customized Workflows Enforcing Best Practices
“We were also attracted to i-Sight’s customizability,” Peters added. “With others, we would have to fit our processes into a pre-defined track that didn’t address our specific needs.”
Customer Expressions delivered on that promise of flexibility, mapping company processes and designing custom fields and templates specifically for the glass company’s various workflows. In DGMC’s case, that meant enforcing its seven steps of corrective action.
Throughout the initial deployment and ongoing, Peters has appreciated the exceptional support behind the product. “Customer Expressions has given us everything we need and responds within a day whenever we call,” Peters said. “They’re bright, easy and pleasant to work with, which for me is the most important thing.”
Once in place, i-Sight quickly demonstrated its ease of use, with employees rapidly integrating it into their regular workflows. About 50 of the company’s 900 employees have access to the web-based solution. DGMC runs three processes through i-Sight and will soon go live with a supplier workflow.
DGMC takes each customer complaint seriously, logging every issue in i-Sight. The software immediately routes them to the responsible managers, who then own complaints through to corrective action. This improves the visibility of issues, helping the company identify and resolve recurring problems.
A workflow that tracks internal matters helps the company pinpoint sources of inefficiency or problems in quality, such as repeated process failures, to ultimately put better methods and practices in place.
A Safer Place to Work
Perhaps most critical, i-Sight gives DGMC a means of tracking, reporting on and remediating safety incidents. A capture form ensures supervisors enter all the key information needed. From there, i-Sight routes it to a nurse and safety manager to follow.
With consistent information capture, the company has much more accurate, real-time data, all in one location. This allows managers to view and analyze safety matters and find resolutions, making for a safer work environment.
i-Sight integrates the company’s approval steps into each workflow, ensuring that each issue has the necessary approval before moving on to the next stage – and that no issue ever just falls through the cracks. Within that, each person has a certain amount of time to address it as i-Sight guides them through the steps of correction action.
The Results
i-Sight reporting enables DGMC to measure performance against current goals, and set ever-more-ambitious targets for the future. In response, DGMC expects to realize several valuable improvements:
- Reduce the number of safety incidents by analyzing and following cases through to corrective action.
- Improve overall efficiency, measured by factors like production yield.
- Lower the number of customer complaints, thereby enhancing customer satisfaction.
“With i-Sight in place a short time, we already know we’re resolving safety incidents more quickly, and other issues in the desired timeframes,” Peters said.
"Rather than just keeping a record of what’s going on, the software assists you in managing every case until closure."
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