Customers and Suppliers

In today's paper, there were two articles that illustrated the relationship between customers and suppliers.

The title of the first article: Ohio Nuclear Plant Owner to pay $28M.

If your business ships a product, how many times have you suspected that defective product was in routeto your customer? Do you inform them or keep silent and hope that nothing happens? There is nothing worse than staying mum and receiving the call days later. Yes, the customer did receive bad product and now you have a mess on your hands. It's analogous to when your children do something bad and try to lie their way out of trouble. The truth will set them free but the dishonesty becomes the big issue.

The owner of the nuclear plant tried to cover up an acid leak in his plant. In the worst case scenario, the acid could have eaten throught the reactor vessel's six inch steel cap. I'm not sure what that means but it doesn't sound good.

So the customer is the community. The owner and his employees had a responsibility to inform civic leaders of this issue. We don't know what would have happened (we never know when we call the customer) but let's hope that the community and company would work together in a spirit of partnership to mitigate the risk.

The other article's title: Japan Stops Shipments of U.S. Beef. Think of this process flow:
1. U.S. raises cattle
2. U.S. slaughters cattle
3. U.S. inspects beef
4. U.S. ships beef to customers
5. Customers inspect beef
6. If beef is good, distribution to the public occurs. If bad, the beef is quarantined and shipments are halted.

Does this sound familiar? Of course it does. It doesn't matter is you ship toys, engines, or beef, there is always the fundamentals of the customer-supplier relationship. You (as the supplier) better have the quality system to support the relationship.

According to the article, Japan accounts for 35.9% of the U.S.' global sales of beef. We'll call them an important customer. On Friday, Japan halted all shipments of U.S. beef because of mad cow fears. This came six weeks after Japan lifted a two-year ban on American beef.

The recent incident resulted from a Japanese inspection of a veal shipment from a plant in New York. The U.S Agriculture Secretary's response included immediate dispatch of inspectors to Japan and unannounced inspections at U.S plants.

Though the complexity of this issue is mind-boggling, the core issue is fundamental; the action orginally taken to eliminate mad cow disease in the U.S (allowing Japan to lift the two year ban) did not hold. In short, their corrective action did not work. Now the U.S is back in containment mode.

As quality professionals, try to look at societal issues with your unique perspective.