Who is your customer?

I heard this story in (Juran) Quality Training in 1985. It was presented as a true story that happened in the 1948-1950 timeframe.

The setting was post-war Japan in a textile mill that spun yarn and thread and knit them into consumer products. The United States paid for automated equipment to lift Japan's economy out of the basement. The equipment was not placed in a purpose-built building but was shoe-horned into a multistory factory.

The problem was that every so often, a skein or spool would come into a station that fed into one of the automated looms and loom would lock-up into a giant rat's nest that took an hour to disassemble and clear out.

The problem was traced back to an operator on a lower floor who removed skeins from a winder and placed them on spindles on a roller-rack. When the rack was full she had a minute to stretch her back before the next rack replaced it.

She was not using the knot that she had been trained to use because she had found a quicker, "better" way to knot them. When the loom operator tied the tag-end of one of her skeins onto the tag of the skein that was almost used up, it did not untie the knot but, instead, resulted in the entire hank being gobbled up by the machine in one big chunk.

Rather than summarily firing the operator, the Quality Manager waited for the next train-wreck and then he directed the repairmen to not touch the machine until he returned.

He plucked the prideful worker out of her downstairs job and escorted her up to the behemoth (compared to the stature of a typical Japanese woman of the time) loom and then directed the repairmen to begin.

She knew that they knew that she was the cause of the problem. The entire factory ground to a halt as material backed up behind the loom. An hour later, they were able to restart the loom at low speed and it took another hour before the loom's timing was dialed in enough that they could run at full speed.

The woman burst into tears "I had no idea!" she gasped, sure that she was about to be fired.

The Quality Manager shook his head "No".

"Go back to your department and tell them that the roller-rack is not your customer. Everybody down-line of your station is. The rack, the shunter (who moved the racks from one floor to the next), the loom operator, the repairmen, the store that buys our sweaters and even the customer who ultimately purchases our products." 

"Tell them to follow their written instructions exactly they way they are trained...even if it seems stupid or like it is make-work."