Engaging Hidden Internal Customers in Custom Automation Equipment Development Projects

Have you ever been derailed by a new requirement when you’re well down the product development path? Has this requirement come from an internal customer that you hadn’t heard from before?

Whether because of scope creep or an incomplete understanding of customer needs, changing requirements is one of the leading causes of delays and budget overruns, especially for custom automation equipment and factory automation projects, especially for semiconductor metrology and inspection equipment. One of the most challenging tasks is gathering and synthesizing the project requirements. That task is made significantly more difficult when the relevant stakeholders aren’t included in the beginning.

Although there are other facets to this problem, this article addresses two issues that affect almost every product development project: identifying all customers and getting them engaged with your project.

How to Identify All Customers: Internal & External

While identifying all customers is probably easier, there are almost always more customers for a product development project than is apparent at first.

This could include external customers that you could interview but they are typically represented by your sales team and other customer facing employees. Additionally, there are supporting team, including manufacturing, customer service, applications, technical writing, and finance. You can always count on the executive team having a large stake in your project.

Answers to these questions will help you discover additional customers:

• Who is affected by the outcome of this project but isn’t on the product development team?
• Considering those in the factory and in the field, who else will be impacted by your project?

Walking through your product development and launch process is an effective way to discover additional customers. For example, when will finance need to approve your project? When will purchasing and supply chain management get involved?

Proceeding through your project’s approval process can help you identify these and other internal customers. Engineering team members may be unknown until you discuss how product/equipment interfaces will be addressed and if other possible applications for the design can be identified. Applications engineering and quality control (QC) are other internal customers that can be identified when you walk through project launch.

Specific internal customers may be avoided out of fear that they may have different expectations of your project. It’s almost always best to surface everyone’s expectations up front as it will be far more difficult to address them later because late surprises in product development can cost a lot of time and money, threatening your project’s success.

Internal Customer Engagement

The job of the project manager often includes identifying specific people responsible for providing you with input from each department. Because this can be challenging, the second problem arises: getting internal customers engaged, especially in the multi-tasking, multi-project environment of most companies.

It can be a mistake to assume that once someone from each department is assigned to your project, they will start to work with you straight away. It can also be a mistake to assume they know what support they need to provide for your project. This is because most people are dedicated to multiple projects at any given time and supporting your project is just one more responsibility for most internal customers.

Engaging internal customers is easier when you educate them on the value of getting an early start on the project. Specific examples of how early involvement in the planning process will save them time and energy later, and how this will result in a better project outcome, is a good way to start. A good example is the software interface: if protocol requirements are clearly identified early, compatible hardware and software can be incorporated, avoiding costly software rewrites later.

A lack of internal customer engagement isn’t necessarily laziness or lack of desire, but instead a lack of time or resources. The product development team may be tempted to move forward without internal customer input when representation is lacking but your project can be delayed significantly when missing requirements are discovered on a piecemeal basis.

By developing strong working relationships with these internal customers and taking time to understand their requirements, effective project managers can address gaps until qualified team members become available. If these missing internal customers feel you understand their requirements and make a sincere effort to accommodate them, they may give you a lot of latitude. Effective project managers also leverage internal customer time by identifying the parts of your development project that impact them specifically, which allows critical questions to be answered with minimal effort.

How a Design & Build Partner Can Facilitate

Identifying each internal customer and getting them engaged is key to achieving overall customer satisfaction and project success. Seeking hidden customers from the start minimizes unpleasant surprises for all. Finding creative ways to include them in the process with distilled, highly relevant questions also leverages their time effectively and helps ensure their engagement.

An external design and build partner can help you find and engage all internal customers to avoid surprises and satisfy all of their requirements to ensure a successful product development project, while also providing engineering design, prototype builds, and may even be a manufacturing option.