Whether or not they realize it, everyone, in every organization is providing products and services to customers. While we tend to think of “the customer” as only referring to the outside customer who ultimately receives the product or service that our organization provides; the reality of the situation is that there are many “customers” within the organization itself. Every individual and every department is providing something to customers, who are often other departments and individuals within the company. How well we all provide those products and services will ultimately affect how well the company services that outside customer.
When I was working in manufacturing engineering, we had a major order of city transit buses to produce for a particular city. The order was for 1,000 buses, which for us was a whole year’s production. The only problem was that completing the order required some major changes to our product. Fortunately, the order was large enough, with enough profit potential, to pay for the engineering costs of making that change.
Unfortunately, the company managed that project very poorly, with the majority of the departments forgetting about the overall goal; even worse, forgetting that the success of the company required each and every person, in each and every department, to satisfy the needs of their customers, in order to insure that the external customer’s needs were met.
Let me show you what I mean:
First of all, design engineering had to create the change. The “product” they produce consists of a bill of materials, and drawings of both parts and how those parts went together. Without them producing their product accurately and in a timely manner, nobody else could do their job.
Purchasing had to find sources for the new parts that design engineering had determined were needed for this design change. Their “product” was the purchase orders necessary for the suppliers to produce those parts. Without producing those purchase orders in a timely manner, the suppliers couldn’t produce the parts in time.
Manufacturing engineering had to write the procedures by which the changes would be manufactured, buy tooling and in some cases design specialized tooling; those were their “products.” Without creating those procedures and procuring the tooling in time, the production worker, their customers, would be sitting there with parts, and not knowing what to do with those parts.
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