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

[Mill_Control]

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).

IME the OEM and customer are equally guilty. Seems nobody qualified to spec a project is involved, on either side, until it's too late.

To jdbrandt's ten commandments I would add, "furnish good parts for the runoff".

Furnishing ANY parts would be an improvement on some of the jobs I've done. That and things like compressed air. One job, for a machine that required 25 cfm, the customer had a framing nailer compressor

 

[gas]

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".

That's SOP in plastic molding. No matter about the many bold type notices we always get out of spec parts for a run off. They never want to "waste" the good parts.

 

[FactoryTalktotheHand]

Furnishing ANY parts would be an improvement on some of the jobs I've done. That and things like compressed air. One job, for a machine that required 25 cfm, the customer had a framing nailer compressor

My favorite is when they won't furnish parts for a VISION system. It's always a headache having to explain that, yes, you need ACTUAL PARTS to register master images with. Oh and don't get me started on lighting. People will spend $10,000+ on an expensive Cognex setup but ask them to spend a few hundred extra for proper lighting? Oh you're just throwing their money in the toilet. Fine, enjoy your fluorescent lights. Just don't complain to me when a year from now the camera doesn't work because the lighting color changed over time.