How is it possible to ship customers the right product, on time, and still fail to fulfill their requirements? Most organizations do a pretty good job of determining what product the customer wants. Based on what I’ve observed during surveillance audits, they’ve also improved their processes for controlling the variables that can affect delivery. Much of this is attributable to improved practices for qualifying and monitoring suppliers, getting reliable information from vendors before quoting a project or accepting an order, and assessing the organization’s capacity to meet the order requirements. Companies are even doing a better job of reining in the maverick salesmen who make unrealistic promises just to land an order. And yet, we still fail to meet some of the customer’s requirements.Companies increasingly rely on their suppliers to comply with additional requirements in order to streamline their own supply chain management and to bring more consistency and reliability to their receiving and warehousing processes. Following are examples of customer-specified requirements that exceed the traditional quality product and on-time delivery.

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