HELPING THE CUSTOMER HELP ITSELF — AND YOU

There’s a popular belief that the customer is always right. But the customer is not always right. In fact, customers can be very wrong, especially when they jump into supplier processes without knowing the consequences.

The truth is that suppliers and customers depend on each other. Both suffer if either side acts in ways that degrade product reliability or increase costs without offsetting benefits. Often, customers need wise supplier counsel to make the best decisions.

We see the wrong dynamic all the time in our work on behalf of automotive and aerospace/defense clients. It begins with a cluster of unit rejects. The customer demands immediate corrective action — usually more inspection — to prevent further failures. Suppliers almost always agree, even when the rejects are actually the result of improper customer evaluation. And that’s bad for both the supplier and the customer.

A common scenario begins with a customer inspector rejecting solder connections that don’t coincide with the inspector’s concept of acceptable solder. The root cause is probably misinterpretation of reliability criteria by the customer inspector. (Interpretation of solder joint reliability is a chronic problem. Our solution is EMS Reliability Criteria.) Typically, suppliers complain to themselves about the faulty inspection but don’t try to reason with the customer. They think that the customer will regard their willingness to cooperate as a sign of a good supplier; in fact, the customer thinks that the supplier is unreliable and praises the astute inspector.

The usual customer demand in a situation like this is for more supplier inspection. And the usual supplier action is to add the inspection. The customer is unhappy with the supplier and the supplier is unhappy with the customer. The supplier’s costs go up and, because of the extra handling, the product reliability is compromised.

Let’s be clear about this scenario. In this case, the solder connections are reliable and the customer inspector made a mistake. If the rejects were for valid reasons, the supplier needs to take immediate measures to eliminate the problem. We are not suggesting that suppliers should ignore valid customer concerns.

One nasty characteristic of inspection is that it never goes away on its own. Adding inspection for a temporary situation generally means that the extra handling will be built into the operation forever. And, in many cases of genuine reliability problems, inspection is a bad corrective action choice.

Customers are human. They make mistakes. They don’t know everything about the production processes or even about reliability. But most customers will gladly listen to a supplier who makes a scientific case. It isn’t always easy for suppliers to reason with their customers and that’s where we come in. We have been educating customers and resolving conflicts between suppliers and customers for more than 20 years. Customers trust us because they know we only tell them the truth; they know our clients (the suppliers) will make changes in their processes if there really is a processing problem.

So the customer isn’t always right. The supplier has responsibilities, too.

For information about this or any other service of Electronics Manufacturing Sciences, please write or call (01)727–866n-6502, extension 21.

A true story about the consequences of mindlessly following "the customer is always right:"

A client supplied plastic switch covers to an automaker. The plastic had to match the color of other materials on the door panel. So the supplier specified the colors in spectrographic terms.

The customer didn't own a spectrometer. It did have an inspector in a windowless room and the inspector would look at all the parts to see if they met the standard. Invariably, the inspector rejected 50% of all the parts. And spectrometers proved that the rejected parts were identical to the accepted parts — and all the parts conformed to the spectrometer criteria.

We recommended that the client insist on the customer buying all the parts. But the client's sales people insisted that this would mean they would never get another order. So they put one of their own employees in the room with the customer's inspector. The client's inspector checked all the parts before passing them along to the customer inspector.

The result was horrible. The employee rejected 50% of the parts, too. Then the customer inspector rejected 50%. Only 25% of the parts were accepted. The loss was millions of dollars.

When the contract came up for renewal. it was awarded to a competitor.