Lessons they don't teach at Business School. We were selling some products to a mining a company in Australia and received complains that our product was working less efficiently than what their competitor was getting from similar product.
As per them, their competitor company, sax X , was mining more meters than what they were getting with the tools we were sending to them. He was not aware that we were only selling the same product to X. And I found it hard to believe how can the same product behave differently.
So I went to the mines in New Castle, Australia. Went inside with the miner. Our packaging( design comes from the customer) was in buckets ( like paint buckets) each weighing 20 Kgs. The miner carried those buckets inside the tunnel. And I could make out he was inn pain because
the handle was all metal and no cushioning over it where as the boxes of X company had a plastic cushion and carrying two boxes was painful. The miner would be frustrated whenever he carried our boxes and that would effect his work
And when the supervisor questioned why he was inefficient , he would simply say these tools that you give me don't work properly. Supervisor filed this in his notes which went eventually to the Purchase head sitting in Sydney and he threatened to cancel orders
No body tried to find out the root cause. We asked them to change the packaging design and it worked. We never received any more complains. This lesson taught me that its not just your product but what all needs to be done for a wider acceptance and keeping the operator happy..
is as important as the quality your make. 'Happy' does not mean bribing. Its creating a 'feel good' factor for them. The look, feel and continual feedbacks from them help us more than design teams sitting in air-conditioned offices. Field feedbacks matter more.
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