This is an excerpt from the book "Five Minute Lean", by David McLachlan - a wonderful book that blends teaching of the tools, culture and philosophy of traditional Lean with a modern-day Lean parable. You can get the whole book on Amazon here and enjoy your own copy.
Value is Determined by the Customer
If you want to start revealing process improvement opportunities straight away, you can jump to Chapters Two and Three, however the reason we start here is that when it comes down to it, customers are the reason we are in business. Happy customers mean a happier workplace, and ultimately they pay the bills by buying our product or service. By properly defining value, we can give them an experience they will love, and everybody wins. The first step on our journey is a simple one – we need to define what value means to the customer, to ensure our product or process provides that value.
“Customer” in this case doesn’t just have to be the end customer who buys a product or service. It can also be any person or department downstream, or next in the process from you, as they receive the benefit of your work. In Lean terms, “suppliers” are upstream (before) people or departments, and “customers” are downstream (after).
At the Lean Enterprise Institute, this first step is referred to similarly as “Specifying Value”. Whatever you decide to call it, there are three main things you need to know:
- The product is something that brings value to the customer,
- Value is defined as something the customer is willing to pay for, and;
- To find out what value is, we need to ask, or get feedback.
We will go through all of these in this chapter.
If you are an employee like Lisa, this first step should be fairly easy. The process you go through for your customers on a daily basis to create your product or service is most often what brings them value. Adjusting a product, or adding additional value, can be done using the tools in this chapter, and it starts with gathering feedback (1.2).
This is an excerpt from the book "Five Minute Lean", by David McLachlan - a wonderful book that blends teaching of the tools, culture and philosophy of traditional Lean with a modern-day Lean parable. You can get the whole book on Amazon here and enjoy your own copy.
Selected chapters from the story within Five minute Lean:
- Lean Parable – Where Lisa Makes a Change
- Lean Parable – Where Lisa Discovers a New Way
- Lean Parable – Where Lisa Performs a Balancing Act
- Lean Parable – Where Lisa Pulls the Trigger
- Lean Parable – Where Lisa Sets a New Standard
- Lean Parable – Where Lisa Becomes a Leader
Check out these selected chapters from the teachings within Five Minute Lean:
- Five Minute Lean – Gather Direct Feedback and Indirect Feedback
- Five Minute Lean – Create a New Standard Procedure and Checklist for Quality Control
- Five Minute Lean – Eliminate the Eight Wastes to Improve Flow
- Five Minute Lean – Create a Future State Value Stream Map
- Five Minute Lean – Use Feedback to Fix and Guarantee
- Five Minute Lean – Collect and Measure Feedback With the Net Promoter Score
- Five Minute Lean – Go to the Gemba
- Five Minute Lean – Build in Quality with Error-Proofing and Autonomation
- Five Minute Lean: Glossary
- Five Minute Lean – Create a Pull System with FIFO, Kanban Triggers and Visual Management
- Five Minute Lean – Map the Value Stream to Reveal Opportunities
- Five Minute Lean – Use Pareto to Find Where to Start
- Five Minute Lean – Make Feedback Meaningful with Kano Analysis
- Five Minute Lean – Introduction
- Five Minute Lean Summary
- Five Minute Lean – Add Important Data to Your Map
- Five Minute Lean – Get Your Map Started with a SIPOC
- Five Minute Lean – Organise Your Process with Five S
- Five Minute Lean – Heijunka: Level the Workload when Demand Fluctuates
- Five Minute Lean – Present and Manage Your Change Using an A3 and LCA