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The 11th Asia Pacific Industrial Engineering and Management Systems Conference The 14th Asia Pacific Regional Meeting of International Foundation for Production Research Melaka, 7 – 10 December 2010

Quality Information Sharing Using Bi-Directional Relationship Via Web-Based Feedback System.

Nadiah Abdul Rahman1 and Shahnorbanun Sahran2 Faculty of information science and technology FTSM,Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, 43600 UKM, Bangi Malaysia Email: [email protected] [email protected] Muriati Mukhtar Faculty of information science and technology FTSM,Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, 43600 UKM, Bangi Malaysia Email: [email protected]

Abstract - In the industrialized country such as Malaysia, SME’s is an indispensible part of the economy and contribute a lot of benefits especially to their prosperity. In a fast-paced technology-driven world manufactures have to compete to meet their customers demand especially to maintain their product quality. So the relationship between manufacturer and customers which are the downstream’s element in a supply chain have to be efficient and bidirectional. This paper discussed the development of the web-based feedback system, which is emphasizes the importance of quality information sharing between manufacturer, consumers and end-users for a Small-to-Medium size manufacturing enterprises (SMEs) that involved in chassis assembly & brake components. From this case study, the manufacturer did not used any computer based systems that facilitate the costumers and end-customers gives their feedback, suggestion or complaints when the products do not meets their specification requirements. By using this proposed feedback system, this downstream’s elements can share the quality information through the web to save time and cost for analyse the problems, recording and producing patterns of problems statistically which frequently occurs in an effective way for the purpose of analysis, repair or rework at the same time it’s still control their privacy and important information from public. This paper refers to the concept that the manufacturer, customers and end-customers will be sharing information in bidirectional relationship which mean the end-customers give the feedback not only to customer but to the manufacturer as well. Keywords: Web-based, Feedback system, Quality information sharing, Small-to-Medium’s Enterprise (SME’s),Bidirectional, Product quality.

1. LITERATURE REVIEW Certainly we all have experience as a customer of products or services. As a user, the most important is the satisfaction of that products and services. The word satisfaction here means, user is satisfied with the quality of products and services offered with a reasonable price. A high-quality product can be obtained when the features and

________________________________________ Nadiah Abdul Rahman, Shahnorbanun Sahran, Muriati Mukhtar

characteristic of the product are able to meet the customer’s requirement and expectations. Other than that, customers always want their voice to be listen by the product provider (supplier/manufacturer) especially when there is a problem with the products they buy. Negative experience had a bigger impact to the reputation of an organization. If the user is satisfied with

The 11th Asia Pacific Industrial Engineering and Management Systems Conference The 14th Asia Pacific Regional Meeting of International Foundation for Production Research Melaka, 7 – 10 December 2010 the products and services offered by an organization, that certainly they would be happy to do any business with these organizations in the future and this leads to loyalty. Greg Gianforte, CEO of RightNow Technologies reported that the success of every business depends on translating knowledge about customers into the reality of the customer experience. If you can’t make it easy and satisfying for people to do business with you, you’ll lose them to someone who does—and quickly.

produce a local car as their product and sell them to a dealer or individual. But this manufacturer that involve in chassis assembly and brake components did not know or communicate with the dealer or person who buy the car. So they only have a feedback and complaints from the first level customer. Actually, to maintain their product, they need to have all the information about quality and performance of their product from the end-user.

1.01 Quality Information Sharing In the manufacturing industry, manufacturer must ensure that their products are always at the best quality to compete with other companies and also to ensure they will continue to compete for foothold in this industry. Manufacturer will conduct strategies in terms of design, engineering and manufacturing process involved in fabricating the product to maintain and improved the quality. One of the alternatives to help them improve their business is by sharing information on quality. This is the best way rather to improve the supply chain performance, reducing the error, making a better decision, better resource utilization or even to lower the supply chain costs. Nowadays, information sharing is not only important among the companies but it is important to share information between supply chains. The elements of supply chain need to be collaborate to make sure they can have efficiency on making decision and analysis. According to Lee (2000) and Mentzer (2004), when companies could manage the information in a better way, they can be more responsive to customer’s demands. So to

We are focusing on the downstream elements in supply chain that involved a communication between manufacturer, customer and end-customer. We will see how the quality information sharing between these three elements through a well feedback system give a big impact to the quality of their product. It becomes extremely important to determine as quickly as possible what customers want so as to capture new customers as well as to keep existing ones. Obtaining customer feedback is essential to finding this information (Wisner et al, 2000). There are three-part typology for organizational information systems based on interdepencies inspired by Hong 2002; Kumar and Van Dissel, 2006. They gave a three trend of structure of information sharing that used by organization around the world. Table 1 show the information sharing structure. Sequential information sharing: In this structure, the output will flow from one of the partner's activity and will be accepted as input by the next trading partner. The

Table 1. Information Sharing Structure Information

Sequential

Reciprocal

Hub-and-Spoke

sharing Structure

For Small and medium sized enterprise, most of manufacturer only knew their first level customer and not all of them realized that the end-customer who use their product daily are important too. For example in this case study, manufacturer is producing a brake for their customer which involve in automotive industry. This customer will


information sharing between these two partners’s activity will link until it form a sequential chain. This is the simplest information flow structure and most of organizations implement this arrangement. Each pair of partners can establish their own protocols to exchange regardless of any universal standard. They may rely on

The 11th Asia Pacific Industrial Engineering and Management Systems Conference The 14th Asia Pacific Regional Meeting of International Foundation for Production Research Melaka, 7 – 10 December 2010 electronic data interchange or other communication mechanisms. Reciprocal information sharing: This kind of information sharing structure is more complex than the latter. The flow of its information is bidirectional and each partner may communicate with several others. Unfortunately, inconsistencies can arise between the information of different partners because there are multiple flows. The best coordination mechanism for partner is to synchronize and integrate the interactive processes which could reduce uncertainty and conflict in the collaboration. Hub and spoke information sharing: This structure is based on a central hub that communicates with all partners within it. Generally, a virtual marketplace is served by an Internet-based e-hub in this architecture and thus facilitating full range of business processes and interactions between trading partners. The hub connects all partners to communicate. It also coordinates, stores, aggregates, and maintains information about each partner as well as makes decisions for them. An e-hub-based architecture features “plug and play” capabilities with few integration points between applications which gives a definite advantage ( Hajibashi 2001). This is a complex information sharing architecture. Such a centralizes hub involves collaborative planning, forecasting, and replenishment (CFPR), as are consortia trading exchanges (CTX) such as Covisint that were launched by GM, Ford and DaimlerChrysler, and private trading exchanges (PTE) such as Carpenterdirect.com (Ross 2003). All partners must use common standards in such architectures for information description, storage, and exchange. Web services technology can help to implement this architecture. In this paper, the proposed system is using the Hub-andSpoke information sharing structure. The manufacturer, customer and end-customer will communicate with each other through the central-hub. The central-hub can be the manufacturer, the customer or other party, which will responsible to make the level of collaboration, is in two ways and centralized. The central-hub will control the information and allows other partner to communicate and share the same information basically on quality. In Huband-Spoke information sharing structure, the partner’s activity will collaborate through web-services. Traditional supply chain always using the sequential information sharing structure and depends on electronic data interchange (EDI) as their technologies to communicate with the partner’s activity.


1.02 Bi-Directional Relationship Bi-directional means anything that can move in two direction usually opposite directions. Merill, Ravi and Vijayan (2000) said that supply chain information flows traditionally were linear flows from one firm to its immediate suppliers (upstream) or immediate distributors (downstream). Information beyond one link in the chain was constrained by lack of formal relationships and did not convey efficiently through the links due to a lack of data representation schemes. According to Table 1, Reciprocal information sharing and Hub-and-Spoke information sharing are collaborating among the partner’s activity in two-ways. It means, the relationship is bi-directional. For Reciprocal information sharing structure, all the partner can communicate with each other through networking, email or videoconference. Each of them have their own thought and opinion difference with other partner, but sometimes the information could be the same. Hub-and-Spoke information sharing is in bi-directional too. But it is easier than reciprocal structure. Because it is centralized which is the information will be send to the center. All this are working via web services that can ensure the partners are always connected.

1.03 Feedback System When implemented the feedback system, it will benefit both the customer and the product or service provider. They will receive maximum customer satisfaction. By this system, manufacturer is able to capture their customer’s feedback more completely. Furthermore, manufacturer or customer can translate the information from end-customer to predict or detect which area is contributed to the dissatisfaction of their product. We need to verify the customer complaint to identify the symptoms. By using this system, we can get all the information from the customer and then the system will give the results that related to the complaint. The system will identify the probability of defections. It can be at the product or the process. As an example, one of the brake problems that always occur is brake noise. This is because of the friction between the pads and drum or rotor when the brakes applied. So when the system can identify the problems, manufacturer can repair the problem and check for proper operation.


Soderland (1998) argues in more general terms that, feedback is a class of behavior which deals with the customer’s transmission of information. To this end, word of mouth is also classified by this author to be a subset of this class of behavior. He further argued that both a positive bias and a negative bias may be expected in feedback behavior but yet feedback behavior is somewhat different, since it involves transmitting information to the very actor was involved in the situation which created the decision to transmit feed-back. Soderland (1998) further advanced his argument to assume a zone of indifference also in the case of feedback. He defined this term”zone of indifference” to mean that there is an expectation of the likelihood of a feedback response to be greater when customer’s prior expectations are not matched by the perceived performance (negative and positive discontinuation), compared to the case in which a match does exist (confirmation). More-over given this zone of indifference, it is expected that the satisfaction-feedback link is negative in cases of low satisfaction and positive in cases of high satisfaction Traditionally, the success of customer service operations is measured by internal and quantitative data, such as how long the average interaction time is and how many calls each CSR works on. One reason that these metrics are cited so often is because quantitative data can be collected and analyzed automatically and internally. The Customer Service module can be used to provide detailed quantitative statistics for efficiency analysis and forecasting purposes, Larry (2003).

2. FRAMEWORK FOR BI-DIRECTIONAL QUALITY INFORMATION SHARING

2.0.1 Case Study (manufacturer of Assembly And Brake Components)

Chassis

Figure 1: Quality information for case study.

Figure 1 show the relationship between the manufacturer, customer and end-customer and how they share information on quality of the product. The manufacturer is involved in chassis assembly and brake components. They supply the front brake corner to the customer which is involved in car assembly. So when there is a problem with the components during the assembly process, the customer will give a feedback and complaints via phone or email so the manufacturer can take a appropriate action about it. Most of the time, the customer will contact the engineer via phone and discuss about the problems they are facing and give a suggestion or demands about the products. The problem is, this conversation don’t have a well record system. It only depends on how the engineer captured the information whether he/she jotted it down on a piece of paper or remember all the information given by the customer. The end-customer also has their own problems while using the product (car). When it involved a functioning of the brake, they will refer and give a feedback to the customer which is the one who produce the car. The customer will use the information from the end-customer and analyze whether the problem is occurs during the assembly process or it is coming from the component (brake). If it involved the component (brake), the customer will give the information to the manufacturer. In here we can see that how the relationship seems have a boundary between the manufacturer and end-customer. Customer will be an intermediary between the manufacturer and end-


The 11th Asia Pacific Industrial Engineering and Management Systems Conference The 14th Asia Pacific Regional Meeting of International Foundation for Production Research Melaka, 7 – 10 December 2010 customer. So the manufacturer can’t have the exact information from the end-customer. The manufacturer always visits the customer to solve the problems. They said that this is the most practical way to encounter the problem by see the customer in person. The engineer will do the inspections and try to solve the problem at the customer’s place. May be this is the best way to ensure the quality of the product, but sometimes it will take time and cost.

2.0.2 Proposed Feedback System (Bi-Directional Quality Information Sharing)

6. CONCLUSION For SME's, the quality of product is very important to enable them to compete in this era of rapid development .However they must realize that to achieve and improved the quality, they need opinions, suggestions and support from users that using their products every day. The end-user has experience in using the products in their daily lives and they know their needs and where the imperfection of the products. By sharing information, manufacturer could translate the information to do the improvement in term of quality such as the diameter of the bolt, pressure or incorrect measurements.

REFERENCES Michael J. Shaw. (2000)Information-Based Manufacturing with the Web. Department of Business Administration University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The International Journal of Flexible Manufacturing Systems, 12 (2000): 115–129 Lee, H. L., Padmanabhan, V., and Whang, S.. (April 1997). Information Distortion in a Supply Chain: The Bullwhip Effect. Management Science, Vol. 4, No. 3, 4, pp. 546–558

Figure 2: Framework for the web-based feedback system.

Figure 2 show a framework for a proposed approach. These three elements are located near each other and do not have any restrictions that prevent all these elements to communicate. One of significant difference between the proposed approach with the case study is how the manufacturer and end-customer communicate. Other than that, it also uses the feedback system as a medium to communicate with each other. In figure 2, we can see the manufacturer and end-customer will interact directly through the systems and it means that all the information about the quality from the end-customer will be accepted directly by the manufacturer too. This will ensure the authenticity and accuracy of the information, compared with the information that is conveyed by a third party (customer). Word Bi-directional is translated through the image of the arrow appearing in every corner of the framework.


John G.Sanchez. Customer Relationship Marketing. Building Customer Relationship for Enduring Profits in a Wired Economy. Kobusinge Rita. (2008) Web-Based customer Logging and Feedback Systems for Mobile Telephone Companies. A Project Report: School of Graduate Studies for the Master of Science in Computer Science Degree of Makerere, University. Hartwig Gunzer, (2002) Introduction to Web Services. http://archive.devx.com/javasr/whitepapers/borland/12728JB 6webservwp.pdf Right Now Technologies. (2007) Customer Experiences Report.http://www.rightnow.com/files/analystreports/RightNows_2nd_Annual_Customer_Experience_Im pact_Report.pdf Lexus Technical Training. Brake Diagnosis. http://www.autoshop101.com/forms/brake07.pdf


AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES

Nadiah Abdul Rahmanis a Graduate Student at the department of Computer Industry, Faculty of Technology and Information Science, National University of Malaysia. < [email protected] > Dr.Shahnurbanon Sahran is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Industrial Computing Faculty Of Information And Technology at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Bangi Selangor. She received a Doctoral Degree from the Manufacturing Engineering Centre, University Of Cardiff, Wales, Uk in 2007 and Master in Science at University Kebangsaan Malaysia in 1996. Her teaching and research interests include Spiking Neural Network And Intelligent Optimizations, Pattern Recognition and Quality Control And Statistics. She can be reached at

Muriati Mukhtar is a Lecturer at the department of Computer Industry, Faculty of Technology and Information Science, National University of Malaysia. < [email protected] >


APIEMS Paper Instruction

APIEMS Paper Instruction

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