The next few blogs will be further elaborating on the systems concept of SIPOC.  Upon completion of the characters or phases in the systems thinking and chain of events (SIPOC itself), we will illustrate how we can use these to improve our organization’s capability.

This post will treat “suppliers”. We are not referring to drug dealers, and we are not referring to solely external to our organization or to our company.  We are describing one end of a chain of events that will ultimately culminate in a final conclusive output.  For example, the supplier to the development organization could be the marketing organization as they supply the development organization with the target, “we need …..”  They in turn get their input from customers external that have a need.  So we see an example of the sequence of customers.

Marketing -> Systems Engineering -> Software Engineer -> Verification Engineer -> Etc.

Suppliers need to know what they are delivering to the system including what constitutes sufficient quality for the next person in the chain of events to be able to achieve their respective objective and the entire organization to achieve their overall objective.  We would not hand a piece of plastic to a depending portion of the organization, and expect them to be responsible for converting and delivering a metal part from it.  We are assuming they are not alchemists.  To make the objective of the organization we must have systems thinking and this starts with the supplier or who delivers what to whom.