OT: Customers who have no input until the job is done

Just a rant if you will, but very few things bug me more than when a customer gives you zero direction on what they want, and then when you've already done a bunch of work (even completed it), suddenly they have all these demands and standards you have to follow. My favorite is when the person you're dealing with leaves the company halfway through the job, and the new person just makes a bunch of assumptions as far as what the scope is and gets upset when they find out you didn't read their mind and include it.

So, if you want, share your horror stories here. I know you have them.

I had a run-in w/ management at a company where we were installing a large 40' dispensing gantry. We told our main contact 2 weeks for the install and for some strange reason he interpreted that as two days. Yes, we can bring in an entire I-beam steel structure, multiple panels, testing, etc.. and get everything done in two days. That sounds about right.

By the end of the second day, upper management was quite surprised when we told them it was going to be the end of next week before it would be done.

With a customer you almost come to expect this.

When this happens day in and day out with your boss, and his boss then that is really frustrating.

I feel for you though it sucks to put alot of time and effort into something and then have to listen to a Moron who has no idea what they are talking about tell you how you should have done it. Or that is not how I thought we were going to do it.
Even though they could have said something at any point during the application.
And especially if the way they think it should be done is actually the worst way to do it, or better yet impossible to be done that way.

I just resighned from a large project for this very reason.
Management personnel SOP = making plans on bar napkins and reading them through the bottom of their Scotch glasses and believing that it is the greatest plan on earth.
I am sure that their magic 8 ball will guide them through to the projects compleation.

(Thanks for posting this to give us all an opportunity to rant, I know this will be a good thread to follow)

BCS

I had a customer come in to see the finished project and he said (without cracking a smile) 'I don't know much about automation, but I know what I like, and that ain't it'.

danatomega said:

I had a customer come in to see the finished project and he said (without cracking a smile) 'I don't know much about automation, but I know what I like, and that ain't it'.

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How specific and helpful!

that happen to a company i worked for so much that we started writing up our operational procedure and having that customer approve it before we started doing any work.

james

This one customer we sent all kinds of documents to them about what our plan was. Then, the guy we were dealing with left the company. Sent documentation to the new guy layout out every setting and parameter the operator will set. Don't hear back from him. Finally we bug him enough so he responds. "Yeah, looks good." We get the distinct feeling he didn't read it. That feeling is proven correct when he shows up for part runoff and wonders why a dozen or so parameters he assumed he was getting aren't there, which he'd realize why if he actually read the documentation we gave him.

It's frustrating when you care more about what the customer is getting than the actual customer.

FactoryTalktotheHand said:

Just a rant if you will, but very few things bug me more than when a customer gives you zero direction on what they want, and then when you've already done a bunch of work (even completed it), suddenly they have all these demands and standards you have to follow. My favorite is when the person you're dealing with leaves the company halfway through the job, and the new person just makes a bunch of assumptions as far as what the scope is and gets upset when they find out you didn't read their mind and include it.

So, if you want, share your horror stories here. I know you have them.

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If you google "10 mistakes purchasing automation" you'll see a list that I hand out to all my customers. Its been around for decades (the original was published in 1988, and all the internet copies don't always credit the original author), but it is as timeless as automation itself.

To the "happy" comment, I always suggest buying the customer's project manager a puppy at the start of the project...because, no matter how things turn out, he'll have a puppy throughout the process...and, really, who can't be happy with a puppy.

That is why you write your proposal with enough detail to cover your design AND have an authority of your customer sign off on your design.
At least then you have a way to charge for any changes. I have seen two machine builders go out of business because of not having this.

As Russ said, get it spelled out ahead-of-time - in writing.

And if there are requests for changes, get those requests in writing too.

Valley Ind said:

As Russ said, get it spelled out ahead-of-time - in writing.

And if there are requests for changes, get those requests in writing too.

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Absolutely!!! Customers who don't care or know what they want are all too common!!
Sometimes you are better off to just walk away and let someone else have the problems.

...very few things bug me more than when a customer gives you zero direction on what they want, and then when you've already done a bunch of work (even completed it), suddenly they have all these demands and standards you have to follow.

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Often, what few instructions and communications that the customer DOES give are not passed through the company hierarchy to the person that needs to know. Someone at the top interprets what s/he THINKS the customrer will pay for and that WE can supply (whether it really solves the customer's problem or not).

Lack of good communication has resulted in a lot of failed projects.

To jdbrandt's ten commandments I would add, "furnish good parts for the runoff". I've seen a couple of cases where the end user supplied out of tolerance parts for the witness test at the OEM's factory. When confronted out about it the end user's excuse was "we figured if you could handle out of spec parts, then we'd have no trouble with good ones" or, "we didn't want to waste good parts on trial runs".

During commissioning the project manager tells us:

"We are an FDA regulated facility, we need this system to be properly VALIDATED with all associated paperwork and signoffs."

(Even though we discussed this in the sales phase and it was stated validation was not require).

But keep commissioning so we can produce sellable product in the meantime. durrr......WHAT?!??!

That was ridiculous. Thankfully they hired a 3rd party to sort out the validation procedures.

Paully's5.0 said:

During commissioning the project manager tells us:

"We are an FDA regulated facility, we need this system to be properly VALIDATED with all associated paperwork and signoffs."

(Even though we discussed this in the sales phase and it was stated validation was not require).

But keep commissioning so we can produce sellable product in the meantime. durrr......WHAT?!??!

That was ridiculous. Thankfully they hired a 3rd party to sort out the validation procedures.

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That sounds like the "oh by the way, this panel needs to be UL Listed" notifications I've gotten halfway through construction.