Apr 22 2014
When “Lean” is Watered Down to “The Customer is King”
See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
Contents
Making your business lean might be a surefire way to lose customers | Quartz.com |
“Recently, I lost my wallet and had to replace a couple of bank cards (a situation millions of people face yearly). The first bank I called required me to slowly navigate through an automated system with an endless succession of prompts, while I grew increasingly frustrated and weary. Finally—after almost an hour!—a robotic voice told me that I would receive a new card in about a week.”
http://qz.com/190968/making-your-business-lean-might-be-a-surefire-way-to-lose-customers/
The Toyota Production System (TPS) is the best performing way we know to build cars, and it has a rich technical and managerial content. From the 1970s on, Toyota promoted among its suppliers. They were joined in the 1980s by Toyota’s competitors and a few non-automotive pioneers, who didn’t fully understand it.
Rebranded “Lean” in the 1990s, it was sold first in many manufacturing sectors and then outside of manufacturing. As a consequence, however, the “Lean Body of Knowledge” offered by most consultants and training organizations became more and more generic, and gradually drained of substance.
In this article, Lean boils down to “maximizing customer value using fewer resources.” If that is what Lean is, then I don’t know any businessperson — from my local dry-cleaner to the CEO of a major manufacturing company — who would not claim to doing it. They might express it in simpler words, like “taking care of customers without wasting money,” but the meaning is the same.
“The customer is king” is Business 101, not the defining characteristic of TPS or Lean as I see it, which addresses the needs of all stakeholders, not just customers. A “relentless customer focus” may be what you want to tell customers about, but it is not the basis for providing supplier support or career planning for production operators.
See on qz.com
The KaiZone Friday Favorites: 4/25/2014
April 25, 2014 @ 3:55 am
[…] When “Lean” is Watered Down to “The Customer is King” by Michael Baudin. “In this article, Lean boils down to “maximizing customer value using […]
May 2, 2014 @ 9:08 am
I’ve been making reference to “internal and external customers for each process” when I really should be saying “stakeholders” – I have had to go back and define “customer” as being the stakeholders for each process, which has added ambiguity and extra steps. I will now correct my mistakes. Thanks for sharing!