Planning New Products at MISUMI

Our commitment to your "VOICE."

Every year, the new Misumi Mechanical Components catalog contains 300 more pages than the previous one. This is a result of our product managers' commitment to developing new products to help make you more efficient and productive. And it is all based on your "voice".

Most companies strategize on what products they should bring to market, starting from their manufacturing capabilities, or what new technologies are being internally developed. Misumi never starts the planning of a new product with a supplier, internal engineers, or management -- Misumi focuses on what our customers have told us they need.

Many of the examples in our catalog are based on drawings of implementations by our customers.

Around this time of year, each and every one of our product managers visit anywhere from 50 to over 100 customers. Visits are not made to solicit sales. Instead the product managers talk to our customers about how we can better serve them. After these visits, our product managers come back with a vast database, or a mountain of notes, on what our customers' design engineers said they needed.

Many of the customers in Japan have already learned that they can source much of the components without a machine shop, for less cost and time from Misumi. They know that Misumi can produce almost any kind of shape, size, or material. Now, they've become accustomed to telling us what they need. So we listen carefully. Our customers want Misumi to make more products that will shorten the time they need to spend on drawings or machining. Everything that our customers currently machine themselves, is a potential new product for the next catalog, unless, it is already in the current one.

In order to keep our prices low, we plan products that will be ordered in small quantities from each customer, but provide enough worldwide volume for us to manufacture efficiently. So, a product manager must be confident that the new product will fulfill the needs of multiple customers. In order to accomplish this, every product manager will visit about 100 customers in just a few months. In addition to visits, the technical support and customer support phones are often manned by product managers. Most companies would consider having a product manager spending his day answering customer service calls to be very costly and inefficient. But at Misumi, it is the best way for us to really understand what our customers are asking for.

In many excellent companies, the customer's voice is relayed to the planning department or upper management as necessary. But at Misumi, the customer's voice is handled directly, firsthand.