Lean Process: From 'Get the Customer' to 'Keep the Customer'

By Marta Ferreira

Is your organization ‘committed’ to customer service, yet struggling to retain its customers? If so you are not alone.

While most companies place heavy emphasis on the acquisition of new customers, most fail to provide outstanding value to those customers they already have. When customers feel they are being taken for granted, sooner or later they find somewhere else to take their business.

This book reveals why this situation arises so often, and what can be done to fix it. It shows how to shift both attitudes and processes towards ‘keeping the customer’, while greatly improving productivity at the same time.

'Lean Process' follows the explorations of a group of disenchanted staff members in a telecommunications company. Tired of providing scripted responses they would not want to hear themselves, they seek to understand why orders are taking much longer to process than they should be. Along their journey, they are introduced to the Lean concepts of ‘push versus pull’, ‘value adding versus non-value adding’ and ‘value stream mapping’. They discover misaligned ‘silos’ and hidden queues that hamper, rather than help, the customer experience. With this knowledge they are able to identify hidden opportunities to make significant, customer-oriented improvements.

'Lean Process' will help both managers and front line operators understand what they can be doing better to make their customers genuinely and sustainably satisfied.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Marta Ferreira
• Release date: Feb 9, 2015
• ISBN: 9780987581396

Marta Ferreira

Marta Ferreira Böing is a passionate advocate for the application of lean principles and methodologies to operations management, and the benefits this can bring to both organizations and their employees. She has worked in this area for her entire career, as a manager, consultant and educator. Marta studied mechanical engineering and completed a Master of Science in Operations Management in Europe before moving to Australia. There she joined automotive supplier TriMas Corporation, where she was promoted to Production Manager in just three months. In her next role, at Yazaki Corporation (Australian Arrow), she earned the opportunity to travel to Japan and observe lean principles and practices as applied by the pioneers of process improvement. It was on this trip that Marta learned the importance of lean culture and behaviors to lean success – that lean tools alone are insufficient for the creation of a sustainable lean enterprise. On returning to Australia, Marta worked on the introduction of lean principles to the local Yazaki operation, learning additional valuable lessons about the need to work with international cultural differences during such an implementation. In 2007 Marta joined the ANZ Bank as Lean Advisor to the Managing Director, Operations. Since then she has driven the ongoing translation and implementation of lean principles into the banking environment. She has instigated extensive and widely used training and leadership development programs, and taken a hands-on role with a number of cultural change initiatives. As Head of Global Operational Excellence, Marta managed a team of 17 direct reports and 43 matrix reports across three regions. Her team supported behavior change programs for the bank across all divisions and regions, promoting a lean and continuous improvement culture. Marta had strategic responsibility for overseeing the project managers and driving change in processes, people and systems by preventing error reoccurrences and optimizing operations efficiency through staff engagement and skill uplift, based on the lean principles. Marta developed an operational excellence program which was deployed across offices in Australia, India, Vietnam and New Zealand. Savings identified were valued at over $10 million as a result of 6,000 improvement initiatives implemented by more than 4,000 staff. The program was subsequently formally recognised as best practice by the well regarded international research organisation Corporate Executive Board (CEB) in 2010. She also oversaw the development and implementation of a number of other lean-based programs. Both staff and senior management at the ANZ have recognized Marta’s work. She was selected as a winner of the CEO Recognition Program in 2010, recognizing one of the top 110 staff performances of the year (of over 48,000 staff worldwide). She was also awarded an Individual Excellence Award for Leadership. Marta is also recognized for her expertise, having been invited to speak at the conferences of a diverse range of industry groups, including health care, government, manufacturing and tertiary education. Marta runs her own consultancy practice deploying programs similar to that described in Lean Culture. Her clients represent a wide range of industries, including health care, finance and manufacturing.

Book preview

LEAN PROCESS

From ‘Get the Customer’ to ‘Keep the Customer’

Marta Ferreira

First Published in 2015

by Monterey Press

PO Box 319

Carlton North  VIC  3054

Australia

www.montereypress.com

Smashwords edition

Copyright © Marta Ferreira Böing, 2015

Author contact:  [e-mail]

Website:  www.aleanbook.com

All rights reserved. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. Marta Ferreira Böing asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Cover design by Pedro Farelo

Paperback designed and typeset by JustYourType.biz

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

Author: Ferreira, Marta.

Title: Lean process: from ‘get the customer’ to ‘keep the customer’ / Marta Ferreira.

ISBN: 9780987581396 (ebook)

Subjects:

Corporate culture.

Organizational behavior.

Organizational change.

Dewey Number:     658.3

To my family: Everton, Lucas and Emilia

Your existence fuels my energy and gives me

purpose. Thank you for your support in making

this dream a reality.

Preface

Proponents of Lean Thinking will often emphasize that Lean is as much a philosophy as it is a system or approach to organizing work. They will point out that Lean is not something that can be implemented in a month or a year – it takes a number of years and even then it is never really ‘finished’. Lean needs to be adopted as a way of life for a business; it should never be another in a long line of passing fads.

Unfortunately, when it comes to educating people – both management and staff – in Lean, the training often ends up falling back into ‘toolkit’ mode. That is, participants are provided with a procession of tools and are encouraged to go away and apply those tools in their own workplace.

Three things happen here. First, the importance of implementing Lean as a philosophy is lost. Second, the primary purpose of Lean – to truly align an organization with its customers’ needs – is supplanted by more simplistic goals such as improving productivity or, worse, cost cutting. Third, when one tool or another doesn’t have an obvious ‘fit’ to a specific organization, there is a tendency for Lean to be dismissed as ‘relevant to others, but not to us’. A common misapprehension as a result of this last point is the belief by many that Lean is something manufacturers do – that it is not relevant to service industries, health care and so on.

This book, continuing in the nature of the earlier books in this series (Lean Leadership and Lean Culture), aims to take a different approach. As with the other books, the focus here is less on specific tools and more on promoting an understanding of the underlying concepts of Lean. With such an understanding, readers will be well placed to start applying the lessons of Lean Process to their own organizations, no matter what business they are in.

The central premise of this book is extremely simple: that any company interested in retaining its existing customers ought to be directing most of its efforts towards providing outstanding value to those customers. Put simply, a customer who feels they are being looked after is highly unlikely to look elsewhere. Conversely, a customer who feels they are being taken for granted will, sooner or later, look for someone else to deal with. When they do leave, there’s a good chance it won’t be a single product or service they stop buying, but rather a number of products or services. There’s also a good chance they will spread the word and cause others to be reticent about dealing with the same organization. It is for these reasons that, statistically speaking, existing customers provide much more long-term value to companies than they are often given credit for.

From a Lean perspective, this book focuses on the ‘standard work’ concept that originated with the Toyota Production System (TPS): the idea that if all the steps in a process can be properly matched to customer demand and, ideally, orders dealt with one at a time, orders will flow through the process quickly and with a minimum of fuss. While this sounds simple, in the real world things rarely work like this. As the book demonstrates, what happens more often is that individual steps in a process get locked up in ‘silos’. Those silos – and the people in them – become inward looking, focusing on internal goals rather than on the ‘big picture’ goal of customer satisfaction. Processes become disjointed, unbalanced and unreliable, with lengthy queues between individual steps. This situation is made worse in many organizations where there is little or no visibility between departments: the queues are essentially invisible, with no one taking responsibility for making them shorter. Everyone works hard but customers are left dissatisfied.

Lean Process explores this situation from the perspective of a group of staff inside a fictional (and simplified) telecommunications company. The nature of the business itself is unimportant: readers from almost any type of business will recognize the challenges being faced by staff members who are dedicated to the task of doing the best job they can but find their efforts are often wasted. What are important are the transferrable lessons learnt by the staff in this particular business: lessons about customer value, the behaviors that result from a ‘silo mentality’, the role of measurement – from company-wide SLAs to local KPIs – in driving those behaviors, and the existence of queues and how to find and eliminate them.

The book introduces important concepts of ‘pull versus push’, ‘value adding versus non-value adding’, and a simplified version of ‘value stream mapping’ – all of which can be investigated and applied to virtually any business. Readers will be able to use this knowledge to quickly identify opportunities for genuinely improving customer service in a meaningful and sustainable way.

A note to those already familiar with Lean and the Toyota Production System: the business situation and the concepts presented in this book have been simplified to ensure they can be readily understood by those who have little or no previous exposure to Lean. Important Lean concepts have deliberately been set aside: the use of takt time to determine the optimum operational rhythm; heijunka boards, kanban and other visual management tools; failure demand and so on. This is not to say that these concepts are unimportant – not in the least – but the aim of this book is to build a fundamental grounding in the basic Lean principles focused on customer service. Some of these concepts will be explored in other books in the A Lean Book series, while others are explored at length in other Lean literature. The Epilogue provides some initial pointers for interested readers.

For those who would like to learn more about the concepts presented here, further information is available by registering at www.aleanbook.com. On the last page of this ebook you will find a promotional code. Enter that code when prompted for access to additional, reader-only materials.

Chapter One - A disappointed customer

Garry ripped the headset from his head and threw it onto the desk. He spun his chair around so it was facing away from the desk then stopped and stared up at the ceiling.

What’s up, Garry? said Annabel.

Garry turned to look at his neighbor. I’ve had enough of this. I’ve just spent forty-five minutes on the phone with a single customer. He was unhappy when he called – for all the right reasons. His complaint was genuine. But he was still unhappy when he hung up, swearing that he was going to take his business elsewhere. Despite doing as much as I could to help him, I wasn’t able to solve his problem. Yet another complaint I’m going to have to close ‘dissatisfied’.

He pushed his chair back and stood up. His lanky frame towered over Annabel; she couldn’t help thinking that his height, combined with his rich red beard, would have been a threatening sight in another era. Now he just looked frustrated.

I need a break. I’ll be back in five, he said.

The clock is ticking, Annabel reminded him.

Garry didn’t look back.

It wasn’t until the end of the shift that Garry and Annabel had the chance to speak again.

Can I walk across the park with you? said Garry as they packed up their things and headed for the lift. I need to get something off my chest.

What about your bike? said Annabel.

I’ll just walk with it. That’s no problem.

Annabel waited out the front of their building and soaked up what was a glorious autumn afternoon. The sun was low in the sky, spilling