Humans as Customer Supplied Product

[Marc]

I thought this was 'cute'.

--> From: "J. H. MACKENZIE"
--> Subject: Re: Customer-supplied products/Harriman
-->
--> Message text written by ISO Standards Discussion
-->
--> "<< One speaker at a recent ASQ/ARMA conference classified a human as a
--> customer-supplied product (prime supplier was a hospital!).
--> Customer-supplied products come in many forms. Typos are one checkable
--> specification for documents; there are many others, including specified
--> parts like tables of contents. >>"
-->
--> I have in the past cited trainees on a training course 'customer supplied
--> product' the customer being the management who sent them to the training
--> company 'for further processing.
-->
--> Regards
-->
-->
--> Jim Mackenzie, Consultant, Medical Devices Lead Auditor.

 

[Marc]

Does anyone out there have any people classified as Customer Supplied Product?

 

[Sidney Vianna]

OK, I will bite this one.



Marc, yes. The concept of a person as a “customer property” (not literally, but figuratively) makes perfect sense to me. Imagine this scenario:



Our esteemed Randy is sent as an instructor to teach a private internal auditing course. There are 8 individuals attending this course, all of them, employees of organization ABC.

The course that Randy will teach/instruct has a syllabus and the respective agenda. Let’s imagine for a second that 7 out of the 8 individuals are average or above average, intellectually speaking, and can comprehend the contents, skills, materials etc without much problem. But the eighth person, for whatever reason, maturity, knowledge, IQ, etc… can not follow the minimum required pace of the course and disturbs the progress of the course by asking inappropriate, redundant or untimely questions. Now, Randy has a potential dilemma. Does he pay all the attention to the troubled pupil and damage the chances of the other 7 individuals completing the course adequately? Or he concentrates on the 7 individuals that can adequately complete the course, gain the knowledge and go back to the organization and perform their duties as internal auditors? Sure, Randy could simply “ignore” the 1 individual that is slowing everyone else and “fail” him/her. But sometimes, just by allowing that individual to remain in the classroom creates major distraction.

So, since Randy is providing the ABC organization with a service, but 1 out of the 8 individuals is incapable of being trained, shouldn’t he report back the situation to the customer? You obviously do that in a very tactful and diplomatic manner, but failure to report back that “defective product” to ABC would be a disservice to the client, imo.



I can think of many other scenarios where customer personnel are “defective” and should be reported.



It seems to me that our initial resistance to the idea has to do with the terms “customer property” and “customer supplied product”. But again if we were to call “customer assets” would be an easier correlation.

 

[Marc]

I can see that, Sidney. When I 'bumped' this thread, in part it was because of the uniqueness - Something people don't often consider.

I had one client that had a customer put an inspector in the plant for about 6 months - We called that customer's inspector 'Customer Supplied Product', even though it was temporary...