Customer, consumer, supplier, bollox?

[Roger Key <roger.key@onet.co.uk@pop3.onet.co.uk>]

Hi all

Sitting at the Deming Forum I saw and heard many people talking about 
delighting the customer, customer focus etc etc.  I began to wonder 
as to whether this is such a useful distinction and may it not be 
holding organisations back?

Deming was clear (I think) that he was talking about the consumer not 
the customer.

However who is the customer, consumer or whoever?  Who is Ford's 
customer?  Who is Ford's supplier?  Is it a person, an organisation 
or what?

Tougichi identified quality as being the state that ensures minimal 
loss to society - a concept devoid of customer, consumer, supplier 
etc.  Society is a system in which all parts are interdependent. 
SIPOC is a reduction of the system that allows us to focus on a 
LINEAR PROCESS.

Pirsig identifies in Lila that the individual (of any species) is not 
the pinnacle of evolution.  Being arrogant we (mankind) often 
identify 'man' as being the peak of evolution.  However we have to 
interact to survive - thus the outcome of that interaction - SOCIETY 
- is a higher level of evolution than the individual.  But through 
that interaction we build a shared knowledge and work to increase 
that knowledge, thus this entity - INTELLECT - is higher still than 
society.

Combining these two thoughts we get to 'customer', 'supplier', 
'consumer' as being not entities but systems.

Systems?  What is a system?  Is it one dimensional? Two? three? Four? 
I think it does have dimensions but these are more than physical and 
time.  It is a poly-dimensional thing.  We are all used to the idea 
that systems are nested, like fleas?  (Small fleas have smaller fleas 
upon their backs to bite them, and smaller fleas have smaller fleas 
and so to ad infinitum).  So I would guess that the ideas behind 
self-simularity as illustrated by fractals and Mandlebrot sets would 
then act as a good model for systems.  In these despite digging ever 
deeper you do not get a jump in dimensionality, yet when we look at 
systems we seem happy to make the jump from a poly-dimensional system 
to a two dimensional process.  This may help with understanding, but 
we then seem happy to take entities that exist in the two dimensional 
state - customer, consumer and supplier - and seek to use them as 
useful entities in the poly-dimensional state.  I know that a 
property shown by a system that cannot be deduced from the underlying 
parts is an 'emergence' or emergent property (correctly it is an 
emergency but that has a distinct meaning in English!) but what is an 
entity that (possibly) has meaning at a lower level but has no 
meaning higher up called?

Chewing all the above together.

Quality is that which is delivered when the system is optimised to 
maximise benefit / minimise loss to interlect.

Or is it that which drives the above?

In either case the concepts or customer, supplier and consumer are 
from a reductionist simplification that loses all the important parts 
(?)

R
-- 

	Roger.

---------------------------------oooOOOooo--------------------------------------Roger 
C. Key 				 mailto:roger.key@onet.co.uk
Prescient - The Whole as One
(44) 01639 871062
Web based training for Organisations,	 http://virtual-deming.com
Leadership and Life!