Best way to trend CPMU on bulk frozen production

Hi there!!

I was wondering if anyone was able to part with some advice on the best way to trend complaints.

We are a plant based meat alternative producer who supply in bulk 10kg packs to our customers for further processing. 

In previous roles, we have trended complaint as CPMU sold, which works well for retail packs. If we were to trend the 10kg pack as a unit our CPMU is very high. If we trend per kg packed our CPMU is very low. 

I've not dealt with this product type or category before, so I am just wondering if anyone else has experience of handling complaints of bulk product and how they may have managed their complaint KPIs

Thanks in advance for your help!

The fact that your trend is high when tracking as units, means there is an issue occurring between production and packaging. as those numbers should not be very far apart, are you seeing a lot of issues at packaging?

We sell units that have 12 pieces per unit. We trend by millions of dozens sold

When I was in poultry, we trended by million kg sold (but we moved that much on a bi-weekly basis)

What are you trying to see from your trending?  Can you separate more variables, and trend on different items and not lump everything together?

I've come across this same issue and it seems to apply to any bulk material (i.e. not packed into retail packages). What you're trying to get to is a trended monitoring system that expresses CPMU in a way that gives a meaningful expression of change over time, and you can manipulate that through the way you quantify a 'unit'.

Complaints per million units doesn't necessarily haver to be taken as 'consumer units' or 'trade units' in packaging terms - you could, for example, trend based on complaints per million kg/lb. When you plot this on a graph, ideally you'd like to see enough variation on the trend line to indicate performance but not so much variation that the signal to noise ratio is inappropriate.

My personal stance is that the package quantity is largely irrelevant, and the units you apply to CPMU should be tailored to give a meaningful trend indication. Doing things the other way around arbitrarily bases your quality analysis on pack size rather than being pinned to production output.