Lean Methodology 2 - Knowing Your Customer

          At the center or heart of any company is the customer, or it should be, their satisfaction and wellbeing should be our first concern. If it is our intent to truly serve our customer then listening to our customers should be our top priority. Their problems, concerns, likes and dislikes should be paramount to the way we do business.

          A few years ago, while managing a medium sized printing company, I had the opportunity of dropping by the office of a friend. We had known each other from some previous employment. He had recently become the new in-house Graphic Designer, for a customer we had been doing business with for years, though from the books they weren’t one of our better accounts.

          As I was escorted back to his office, we passed through a rather large warehouse. I couldn’t help but notice the tremendous amount of products they produced and inventory there. I knew of the company from our sales meetings and sales reports, but I had no idea of the volume they handled.

          The whole picture intrigued me and I began asking questions about the company and the extent of the design work he was involved in. I was spell bound. Then after just a few minutes he floored me with a question. “Why doesn’t your company call on us, we do over a million dollars a year in printing?”

          Wow! I didn’t know what to say. I weakly indicated that “I thought we were” and I mentioned the name of our sales rep that was assigned to the account. He knew the gentleman as well. “Oh, he calls up front on letterhead and things like that, but back here is where the real printing is at”, he responded. After a moment I did the only thing I could do; I made a personal promise that the picture was going to change.

          Back at the office the sales rep and I had a rather long discussion about the company and what I had observed. He was nearly twice my age and had managed a national sales force ten times the size of our whole company. I was reminded of this many times and found these barriers of pride, a major challenge in our ability to communicate. At last we came to the conclusion that he had become so accustom to selling a product for which he had no real input that he had become merely an “Order Taker”. He dressed very professional, made his calls like clockwork, detailed his schedule, who he met, orders that were received, quotes that were needed, and cold calls he would try and work in. He was truly one of the most professional and honest men I have ever known. He just had no real concept of being able to truly look beyond a simple office chat, into the real needs of our customers. Needless to say things did change and over time that customer became one of our top accounts.

It is not my intent to cover all the different principles of sales only to point out that the only way in which we truly serve our customers is when we truly know them. As a manager you should take time to ask questions of your sales staff about specific customers.

• Who are they?
• What do they do?
• What are their needs?
• Who are their customers?
• How is their business changing?
• What do they plan to do in the future?
• What is the value of your service or product to them?
• And how can you improve the value of that service or product?

The basic principles of Lean Methodology are based on the values the customer places on your product or service. In another words Customer Value is customer need or desire. Knowing your customer inside and out is essential to the Lean Thinking mindset.

Principles of Lean Methodology Improvement

The five-step thought process for guiding the implementation of lean techniques is easy to remember, but not always easily achieved:

1.   Identify Value - Identify the activities in your process that create customer value, anything else is considered a cost.

2.   Map Value Stream – Determine or identify all the steps, tasks, or activities in the value stream (documenting your production process), eliminating whenever possible those activities that do not create value.

3.   Create Flow - Make the value-creating activities occur in tight sequence so the product will flow smoothly toward the customer. A key note in this process is to understand there is more than one customer to be considered at any given point along the production improvement process. First there is the end user, the customer of the company who will receive the finished product or service. Looking closer we see that Lean is needed in the mindset of every individual employee of the company; each one provides a service or a product to other employees or customers within the company. Each person within the company should treat each other as a valued customer and help meet their needs for achieving success in their activities of responsibility.

4.   Establish Pull - As flow is introduced, let customers pull value from the next upstream activity. How can one procedure or individual activity be improved to help the next activity. How can one procedure or individual activity be improved to help the next activity or task based on the needs of the next customer (employee) and then the final end user, the company's customer.

5.   Seek Perfection - Improve and start over.

References

George, M., Rowlands, D., & Kastle, B. (2004). What is Lean Six Sigma?. McGraw-Hill, New York, New York

Wilson, Lonnie (2010). How to Implement Lean Manufacturing. McGraw-Hill, New York, New York

Wedgewood, Ian (2007). Lean Sigma, A Practitioner’s Guide. Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey

Shingo, Shigeo (1985). The Sayings of Shigeo Shingo, Key Strategies for Plant Improvement. Productivity Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Stephen R. Covey, (1990). The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Free Press, New York, New York

Bizmanualz.com (2005), “Lean Thinking for Process Improvement” part 2 of 3 http://www.bizmanualz.com/information/2005/07/14/lean-thinking-for-process-improvement.html