First Edition Dated September, 2000 38
may wrongly think of their customer only as the company paying for the
deliverable product. Likewise, the supplier might inappropriately be thought
of only as a company supplying raw materials, detail parts or assemblies.
This customer/supplier model is too limited to facilitate variation management
in design effectively.
Requirements Flow in Customer/Supplier Relationships
Paying Customer
- Performance
- Configuration
- Service life
Factory
- Optimum Build
Design
Engineering
- Product Definition
ME, Tooling, IE
- Process Definition
Paying
Customer
Requirement
Supplier
Customer
Customer
Customer
Supplier
Supplier
Feedback
Feedback
Requirement
Factory
- Product
4.5.1_1
Time
The design community must expand the customer definition to include not
only the paying customer, but also the various factory positions that will be
tasked with producing the design. Depending on the scope of the design,
there may be multiple positions or locations at the paying customer’s facility,
your company’s facility and those of your suppliers. The definition of a
customer may also be further expanded depending on the design
environment and the amount of the design a company is responsible for. If
those responsible for the product definition (typically design engineers) are
not co-located with those responsible for manufacturing process definition
(e.g. manufacturing engineering, tooling engineering, industrial engineering),
then manufacturing process definition personnel also need to be considered
as customers. If one’s focus is on only a portion of the overall design, other
design teams or groups responsible for manufacturing process definition may
also have to be considered as customers.
