By Michael Bournazian, Eng., Newsletter Editor, ASQ Senior Member, Quality Management Professional, CSSGB with Rolls-Royce
Customers. Clients. Entities that give you money to provide them with goods and/or services, often to drawing and/or specification requirements. Where would we be without them?
I know where I WILL be once I am without them . . . retired and hopefully on a beach. But until then, I (and most of you too) go to work everyday and do our Quality best to deliver to our paycheck providers the best we can. But as the image meme below correctly states, who/how your customer is (both external and internal ones) can result in your work being exciting and rewarding, or demanding and frustrating.
Having worked in customer facing roles in various companies during my career, I have seen the difference first-hand between customers who make your work smooth and those who make your work rough. It can be quite eye opening at times, considering that all these companies work essentially to the same standards (ISO9001, AS9100, TS16949, etc.), and yet never have I experienced any sort of macroscopic “uniformity” from one to the other, with regards to how they deal with suppliers, how they conduct their audits, how they deal with escapes, etc.
And perhaps that makes sense, since no two humans are alike, and since all these companies are made up of tens, hundreds, thousands of humans, how can there be any uniformity? And yet, in our daily Quality work, what are we very often striving to achieve? Yup, uniformity: from consistently conforming parts to high value customer service to gage repeatability and reproducibility, and on and on.
So ultimately, just do your best to make sure the customer is satisfied . . . even if they are a headcase.
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Thank you, all the best and none of the worst.
