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 Thursday, January 25, 2007 |
| Who is your customer? The Demand Chain. |
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When your company goes to sell the product you have designed or written someone is going to buy it. That someone is probably your customer. I say probably because it's a little more complicated than this and understanding this is pertinent to you doing your design job.
It is important to understand the business demand chain. When a product leaves the manufacturer there may be quite a few other hands the  product has to go through before it reaches the customer. Some of the people that may be in between are as follows: distributors, retailers, plumbers, electricians, home builders, architects, OEM's, resellers, importers, exporters, doctors, hospital purchasing departments, delivery people, air cargo, salespeople, ... Do you think it matters what they think about your product? You bet. There may be several people in between your manufacturing and the end user. You can bet that if any one of them finds an issue with your product that it may hurt sales or even be an obstacle to sales. Because of this each one of these people can be considered 'your customer'.
As a concrete example suppose you are tasked to design a computer controlled faucet. We might both agree that the operation should be simple for the homeowner. We should also have a product that is simple to install. In other words the initial programming of the faucet should be dead-nuts-simple because a plumber, who probably never took a programming course, will probably be installing it. He's not going to recommend it to the homeowner if he does not understand it. This product has to pass muster with at least two people, the plumber and the homeowners.
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admin4 at 1:41 PM |
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