Need
Customer satisfaction is everything. That is why a market leader for harvesting machines wanted to find out how errors and failures of its machines in the first year of use affect the quality and satisfaction ratings of its customers. The hypothesis: different types of errors lead to different effects, regardless of their severity.

Solution
As a basis for the investigation, the error codes of the harvesters were read out of the customer database and processed. The focus was on data from previous years. To determine the quality management index, the three individual values of production quality, reliability and operational safety were combined into one value. Further indices were formed for the machine type, manufacturer image and service partner. The data was evaluated by variance analysis.

Benefits
The results clearly showed that certain errors have a particularly negative effect on the assessment of production quality and other satisfaction parameters. Accordingly, a recommendation for action was drawn up on the basis of the findings, which served the QM team in prioritising optimisation measures.