This article is one in a series about customer-supplier principles for industrial and commercial purchasing relationships.  

© 2000 Corporate Training Partners, Inc. 

Customer-Supplier Principle  #5.

Put your supplier into a state of "self-control."

"Self-control" is the classic feedback triangle with these three elements:

• knowledge of the requirements

• knowledge of performance compared to the requirements

• authority, responsibility, and wherewithal to regulate performance versus requirements

The wise customer and the good supplier put in place the supplier know-how, personnel, and hardware so that the supplier self-enforces the customer's order requirements.

• Example: The customer's requirements call for a difficult-to-measure feature. The supplier price and lead-time include time, people, tooling, and hardware to figure out what this is, and to check any and all other odd, difficult, or peculiar requirements.

• Situation to avoid: The product is provided wrong. Then the supplier says, "What do you expect? We have no way to check that oddball measurement. You should have known that. How the heck do you measure that, anyway? You should have trained us and given us equipment. This is going to cost you extra money, because this is really unusual."

• Question to ask: "How do you make sure you have the know-how and hardware to produce and measure all the requirements, including and especially the unusual ones?"

Amazingly, problems with self-control are not limited to small suppliers.

In the excitement to win a job bid, it is very tempting to overlook a hard-to-meet or hard-to-measure requirement.  No one wants to speak up and "spoil the deal," so the problem is postponed until later -- when it will be a much larger problem!

In consumer life, this manifests itself as the seller accusing the customer of demanding the impossible-to-measure... after the fact: 

• "Nobody knows how to get all the ripples out of that car door; you're asking for some kind of visual perfection that's impossible to measure!"

• "To you, it may look like your wedding cake is slumping, but it's really an optical illusion.'"

• "With our earth-moving equipment, we simply don't know how to make your lawn look any flatter than this."

• "We said we'd SEAL your drive-way cracks, not FILL your driveway cracks, and they look sealed to us; it's just your opinion against ours."

• "We've re-built your transmission, and that noise in second gear is just your imagination; there isn't any way to measure noise."

Yes, it takes time and effort to figure out how to measure things.  Make sure that your supplier takes appropriate responsibility in advance.