Critical to Delivery

Critical to Delivery (CTD) characteristics are services to manufactured goods, and/or transactional characteristics that significantly influence one or more CTSs in terms of Delivery. It represents the customers who have stated needs in relation to delivery. It is of late delivery. However, early delivery might create problem for some of the customers as it may invite excess account requiring payment before the need for such inventory arises. CTDs are transformed into critical requirements of the customer through the quantification of these impact areas.

Every organization and business processes has constraints. There are different forms of constraints. When a product or service is lacking a sufficient amount of some resource to fulfil the market demand or the requirements of customers, then the projects of improvement should be implemented to correct the fault identified in the processes. They depict the necessities of quality but have deficiency in the specificity to be measurable.

Satisfying the customers’ requirements is the sole duty and nature of every business processes. The CT (Critical To) tree is a means that facilitate us to transform the important demands of the customer into services or into the product features, and to connect to these features to the commercial processes. CTD is one of the concepts of CT. There are two types of trees:

• Product tree is first type where CTDs, CTQs, and CTCs features are recognized.
• Process tree is the second type where the processes required producing the product is identified.

The product and Process trees together build the CT matrix. According to the detail available each tree has several levels that are applied for the process or product. Here are different names for each level, these are: subsystem, Subsystem, Complex and Element. There are various benefits of CT matrix. These are as follows:

• It has the capability to categorize prospective Six Sigma projects by distinguishing and classifying processes of leverage;
• It is capable enough to connect the requirements of customer directly to our processes at diverse levels;
• The chance to envision product and process capabilities when the tools of Six Sigma are used and Sigma values are considered.

CTDs are found at any level of the Product tree (CTY tree) and can be defined as a function of the immediate lower level characteristics. CTD along with other critical approaches to processes such as CTQ, CTC etc. are called as “opportunities for non-conformance”. All these must be measured and reported while the CTP represents “control opportunities.” The opportunities for non-conformance that have no direct impact on customer satisfaction should remain in the submissive mode when possible.

A tool is useful in narrowing down the errors in the business processes, either internal or external failure categories. A Pareto chart is helpful in breaking down each of the categories. Pareto chart has many benefits:

• It is helpful towards the organization to get a clear picture of the place the greatest contribution
• A pareto chart gives emphasis on problems so that the major problems can be found out.

Pareto chart provides the information regarding the nature of the problem. The problem may be either critical to quality or cost or delivery and links it to the customer and process where the problem is identified. A useful tool for assuring the critical customer requirement to CTx is the tree diagram. It consists of the physical measurement of height, width, depth and weight.

It is necessary that quality engineering should start with an understanding of quality costs in various situations. At almost every conventional industrial engineering, the quality costs are simply symbolized by the number of items outside specification which is computed by multiplying the cost of rework or scrap. Process of implementation of CTD:

• CTD is used to find out the needs of customers related to delivery of the product. 
• It must be included while drawing a detailed flowchart of a business process.
• The flowchart developed by CTD identifies problems as well as finds out their root causes.
• It also uses to create development in a process.

The critical to delivery concept is an essential part of Six Sigma projects. CTDs are developed in order to fulfil the needs of valuable customers. Customer satisfaction is a primary factor in the development of CTD parameters. Considering the delivery related to customers’ need is most important at the initial stage. The performance level of CTD should be at such a level that it may meet the requirement of the customer. They harmonize improvement or design efforts in tune with customer requirements.