Okay, I’ll say it again, “Who’s the Customer?” Should I repeat it? It is a simple thought. Did I get you to drill down to whomever consumes the product / service / or information? I may have. If not, then good, because there are many customers to satisfy, with the primary one being the end consumer.
In this blog entry I want to emphasize the support needed from management to provide the product / service / or information to the consumer through VA (value added) activities. Along with the VA there are many NVA (non-value added) activities. Then there is the in between, the gray area, the “incidental work”. It is NVA but essential in conducting the business. I am not going to define each here because that is not the purpose of this blog entry. I will, however, defer you to this link should you have questions: “Where to Begin with Lean: A3 Analysis” by James Womack
Value is added at the contact point of the product / service / or information. As the contact point proceeds through the process, it carries the same level of importance at each VA activity. When that activity is upset in any way, it now becomes the focus, to resolve whatever issues that made it go awry. This is where the accountability board needs to be placed to log the issue and to assign a time and date, along with who is accountable, to permanently correct it. Supervisor Gemba walks need to frequent these boards (along with shift pre-start meetings at these boards) to understand missed timing and to get things on track through problem solving countermeasures. The department manager needs to daily Gemba walk these boards (and initialing), making sure there are no barriers to resolution and to verify accountability (that the countermeasure is in process or completed). The department manager also enhances any countermeasures or ads to the supervisor countermeasures, along with answering to upper management as to how this happened. Upper management needs to Gemba walk these boards weekly to assure adequate resources were given, accountability has been met, and that permanent corrective action is in place. This is what industry terms "leader standardized work".
Let us refocus from leader standardized work back onto the customer and priorities. Look at just the VA activities from the beginning to the end of the process. The people performing these activities are your internal customers. Can you prioritize which of these customers is the most important? If you have a normal, stable process, one that is on track, the answer is “no”. If something has upset the VA activity anywhere along the value stream, then that activity or customer takes priority.
The point I want to make is, the further away from the VA activity, with respect to your own activities, the more you become “support” to the internal customer that needs help. Many times people will say they need to finish a report or take care of a broken sink (something to that affect). How is that aligned to the True North of customer satisfaction? So what are your priorities? It should be any VA activity that needs help, at any time. We are all service to that end. Once the process is again stable, then we can re-direct some of our energy to the incidental work, and never to the waste unless we intend to eliminate it.
Management needs to step back and observe, asking “are we satisfying the system or the customer?” Too many times I see we have layered on processes or reasons to do things for the sake of the system, and the customer ends up suffering whether they are internal or external. The sad part is, we never see the suffering of the internal customer because we maintain our silos first, rather than aligning our activities to the internal customer needs, which intern are aligned to the value stream of needs including that of the end user. This is why people preach that you need to understand your process, inputs, outputs, and to identify bottlenecks in the process. This is where we VA, which ends up adding waste if problems are not addressed.
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