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What Does the Customer Value?

6/28/2023

Do all the steps in your business processes add value to your customer? Would they pay for a step if they knew it existed?

When you work on improving your business processes, ask this question. Step 6 involves applying a series of improvement techniques to a company’s existing business processes. One of the techniques, value added, requires you to examine the steps included in a business process and eliminate any step that does not add value to the customer.

This can surface political issues because an internal partner may cling to a particular step for a variety of reasons, but if you focus on the step’s contribution to the customer and the bottom line, it is hard to go wrong. Of course, this goes back to customer needs and how well you understand those needs.

Always ask, would the customer pay?

#BPI #BusinessProcess #processimprovement #leansixsigma #continuousimprovement

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Consider Customer Needs Your North Star

6/19/2023

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When a process does not work, you may hope it will get better on its own or that the problem will simply go away. Can you put out the fire and move on to the next problem? Unfortunately, there is no quick fix to improving business processes. Unless you spend the time uncovering the root cause, nothing will change. You may temporarily stop the pain, but it will not last for long.

And try not to blame employees, which is a great way to kill any business process improvement (BPI) effort. When a department stops performing at the desired level, ask what has changed. Have customer needs increased, do you have changing priorities, has the competition for your product or service increased, or is it another business impact? Priorities continually change as a business stabilizes and evolves. Products and services have to change to keep pace with the competition.

Customer needs have a way of increasing over time – the bar continues to rise as you meet existing needs. Consider thinking about customer needs as your company’s North Star; let those needs guide you throughout any BPI effort.

Engage employees around customer needs and involve them in any process improvement effort. Let them know you are not pointing your finger in their direction, but rather looking at how you can collectively improve the process to keep customers engaged and committed to your product/service line. Position customer needs as your North Star. Directionally, you cannot go wrong.

#BPI #Business Process Improvement #Customer Needs #processimprovement

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Painting a Vision for Business Process Improvement

6/13/2023

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Engaging employees in a BPI effort can appear daunting. We know most people do not like change, so how do you encourage employees to help change your company’s business processes? Telling them it’s good for the customer, while true, may not speak to them emotionally. Create a vision for the work that speaks to the emotional side of employees.

But how do you do this? This does not mean writing a vision statement and posting it on the wall. It means verbally describing the end state with words that help employees mentally “see” the future. Do you see the difference in these two statements?

After we improve this process, our company will experience a 20% decrease in customer complaints.
After we improve this process, our customers will send us testimonials, will follow us on Facebook, and will write positive reviews of our product on Amazon.

The first statement provides a quantitative statement that addresses the analytical side of an employee’s brain, while the second statement paints a picture that an employee can visualize.

Combine both analytical statements and descriptive statements when beginning a process improvement effort to effectively engage employees.

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What Does the Customer Value?

Consider Customer Needs Your North Star

Painting a Vision for Business Process Improvement

Business Process Improvement Blog

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