Although suppliers providing subpar product or services are ultimately responsible for their poor performance, the customer has some responsibility to make dissatisfaction known. Or else suppliers are unaware that customers are not satisfied. And customers will continue to receive poor product or services.
THIS IS MY ‘ISOLATION CABINET’ STORY!
Auditing an incoming inspection process one day, I happened upon a good example. Here’s what happened:
The incoming inspector was testing step solenoids before their release to production. Three groups of parts were on the bench. A group of untested parts sat on the left side of the test fixture. Tested parts were on the right side in two groups: good ones and bad ones. There were two bad ones.
“What do you do with the bad ones?” I asked.
“I’ll show you,” was the reply. The inspector took the two parts to an ‘isolation cabinet.’ This cabinet must have been six feet tall, four feet wide, and at two feet deep. He opened the cabinet doors to reveal a cabinet full of step solenoids just like the two in his hand. The shelves were so full it took effort to make space for these two new additions to the cabinet.
It turns out that the design engineer years ago had used an off-the-shelf step solenoid in product development. The solenoid worked and effectively became the specification. As time went on, modifications to product design demanded slightly more oomph from the solenoid. So in this application, the specified solenoid operated at the edge of its functional range. But this range was never actually defined or specified in the first place. Instead, incoming solenoids were tested using a functional test fixture. While this solution may be effective, it is not very efficient, clever, or conducive to profitability.
WHAT TO DO?
When the Quality Manager heard about the ‘isolation cabinet’ situation, it was brought to the buyer’s attention. Of course, this was news to the buyer. The gut reaction was to rattle the supplier’s chain but that was soon over-ruled. This was a very good supplier. At any time, this supplier could have told them what solenoid they needed, but they never asked. Though the buyer contacted the supplier, chain rattling wasn’t the objective. The buyer was humbly looking for help.
Here, the company didn’t know its own specification. Not having mentioned their problems to the supplier, and continuing to purchase these items in mass quantities, the supplier had no reason to suspect the customer is trashing a portion of each shipment. To be honest, had the supplier asked for customer satisfaction information, management responding to the survey would likely not have known of this problem anyway. It was quietly confined to that famous ‘isolation cabinet.’
Regardless, failure to notify the supplier unnecessarily cost this organization plenty. One moral to the story appears to be: if you are getting bad product or service, failure to complain is your own fault.
In this sense, organizations need to stand up for themselves when it comes to ISO 9001 professionals—consultants and auditors alike. Even if management is not clear about why they are dissatisfied with ISO 9001 professionals, the awareness of their dissatisfaction is enough to be communicated to those in need of improvement. It’s not going to get better until it becomes clear something is wrong.
So in some sense, the customer has not only a right to complain, but a duty to complain.
Bio:
T. D. (“Dan”) Nelson is a quality management consultant, author, and trainer specializing in the process approach, ISO 9001, and related sector schemes. Dan has roughly 20 years of experience with ISO 9000 and over 15 years’ experience with the process approach. Dan holds an MA in Business Administration from the University of Iowa. Dan can be reached at:
dan@tdnelson.com
319.210.2642