How customer value drives Lean Management by aligning products, services, and processes with what the customer always expecting.
If you focus on customer value in each decision, may align your lean management effectively. Seen from its assertive, positive and creative side, (which we all intuit that it has although guys like Kurt Grass insist on denying it), Lean Management has its first operational appointment in considering the value and taking a position regarding it.
We are going to create value, we are going to measure our actions by their significant character, that is, by conferring value to our products, therefore, let’s define what is “value”.
The classic formulation of “lean” gives us clues about it, “value” will be everything in the product or service that we produce that the customer is willing to buy (to pay for it).
But this is not the end of the matter, it only makes it begin. This is the objective of this post, to show that this beautiful formula is either empty or a truism if we do not define exactly what it is and what its combinatorics are.
What is the value for a particular product?
The value will be a combination of elements, that is the first thing we have to consider. The customer is looking for a physical x1, a product that satisfies a certain need (the value will be the product’s ability to satisfy it), but, in addition, the customer wants it at a price x2 within certain parameters; On the other hand, you will want a service, you will want a guarantee, you will want a durability, you will want an ecological character, you will want a visual appearance, you will want… Buddha knows that, we will have to find out.
The value is not a single variable, it is a weighted set of them.
In fact, the set of parameters that give value to a product is practically infinite, some have an almost negligible relative importance, others are decisive. Pareto also helps us when assessing and weighing the factors involved and giving them a relative, weighted and comparative role.
All this is more obvious than the Doctor.
Now comes when I put a question for reflection to you. Typically, there are two perspectives when establishing and characterizing value: the customer’s and ours.Interestingly, they are never identical, and here come the problems.
When we design and develop a product, we have to be alert about this distance. When we produce we have to concentrate on customer value. And we have to evolve with it.
The more variables we take into account, the more chances of getting it right, the more we leave to chance, or evaluate wrongly, the more chances of failure.
Commitment
It is a truism, but to believe that by our experience, by our technological or theoretical capacity we know what the market wants and demands, can induce us, however arrogant, to bulk errors.
In addition, there are financial, legal and management conditions that influence us when considering the value that the customer cares about a radish. Our financial capacity, our assets to be amortized, our labor responsibility, our commitment to OSHA, to our governments, to our sources of financing… Normally all this is a condition on our perception of the good, the valid and the correct, but they have nothing to do with what the client wants. I say normally.
The needs and tastes of the client change, our own products make them change, if we do not adapt, we will create waste even if we are inspired by the best lean principles.
It is a principle of cleanliness, almost 5S‘s: Everything that for us is value and is not for the client, is waste. Yes, it sounds paradoxical, but it is so.
The customer pays for something, the rest is our problem.