4. Customers and stakeholders, and their needs and expectations

Building a high-performance, recognized QMS over the long term requires the company to know its customers inside out. Generally speaking, when we talk about customers, we're talking about end-users. But in the reality of a company's day-to-day business, things are less straightforward. Let's take the case of a distribution logistics company that receives, stores, manages and dispatches goods of all kinds. Its customers are the companies with which it signs contracts, and consumers.

But in this work, there are very often interested parties: sales outlets of all kinds (from large chains to local stores) who are not the end users of the products or services, but whose satisfaction is a sine qua non condition for maintaining the contract. In many distribution logistics companies, the sales of these outlets depend on the delivery or shelving of products destined for...