Original Date: 01/24/1994
Revision Date: 01/18/2007

Harris Semiconductor instituted its Customer Return Services (CRS) Program in April 1993 based on the recommendations of its System Improvement Program Team. The existing system was inefficient and burdened with an unfriendly customer service flow. There were long delays for return approvals that could take as long as two months. The previous system was plagued with personnel doing the same work in a reactive mode. Customers wanted a single point of contact and in many instances worked outside of the existing return system, creating greater inefficiencies in the system. The System Improvement Program Team identified factors leading to delinquent customer responses.

Using other CRS systems as benchmarks, a new system has been developed where product line information comes to one point. The process adds performance metrics to the CRS Program. The impact of these modifications focus on total customer satisfaction, consistent satisfaction, less frustration, better tracking and history, and a proactive approach.

CRS not only benefits the customer but Harris as well. It provides time savings, reduced inventory and shipping, and accounting cost savings. Other benefits include better accuracy and data consistency, as well as reducing the number of teams needed to control field returns. This new system was implemented in April 1993 and has since produced an increase in the ratio of analyses completed to the number of new failure analysis (FA) requests from 0.60 in 1990 to one in 1994 even with a substantially increased workload.

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