Customer and Supplier Coordination at Rane Brake Linings

8 Customer and Supplier Coordination at Rane Brake Linings 

This section describes processes for customer and supplier coordination at Rane Brake Linings (RBL), Deming Award-winning brake lining supplier in India ([44]). One of RBL s customers introduced a new two-wheeler disc pad in the Indian market. While RBL produced the product to specifications, the pads were found to stick during use by the end customer. The customer reported the problem to RBL on 14 April, 2004. The twowheeler manufacturer claimed that the parallelism of the installed pads was 

Historically, employees in the company would have focused on who would require the service, who would pay the costs, what the impact of a failure to solve the problem would be, if the customer would appreciate the effort, and so on—all risks associated with taking this action. But RBL was implementing total quality management (TQM). Within this context, the decision to lead development of a solution was easy. Since customer satisfaction was important, RBL offered to solve the problem and believed that its superior processes were capable of managing the execution. 

How does this help a potential buyer of RBL s products The buyer can now potentially decrease the overhead (engineering and procurement staff) that would otherwise be required to play the previously described coordination role. This reduction in overhead is an added reduction in costs related directly to items that can make RBL more competitive overall even if its product prices are higher. In fact, one of RBLs overseas customers claimed that he chose them over stiff competition because he could potentially take a vacation as planned, knowing that any problems that would arise would be resolved by RBL within the supply chain. This capability can be worth a lot to a global buyer. 

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