Shingo views “value creation” for the customer in a similar way to Lean Thinking. Ultimately, value must be defined through the lens of the customer and be willing to pay for.
My observation is that often organisation focus too much on creating value for shareholders and can lose touch of the end game. Successful organisations understand the voice of the customer (VoC), gathering input regularly and seek to continuously improve over the long term.
Good behaviours are where organisations investigate what their customers really value and communicate that throughout the whole organisation. A good VoC system would permeate all levels of the organisation and customer feedback would be shared and acted upon to all levels.
Teams would then act upon the feedback and seek to improve their work to batter satisfy their customers. We would also be able to see a clear connection between improvement and customer satisfaction and measures are used to drive improvement.
we might see root cause analysis of customer complaints. We may also see SoP’s being defined and in some cases refined to maintain quality and efficiency.
So for your organisation, maybe ask yourselves a couple of questions?
How does your organisation choose which improvement activities to do first?
Where is your most recent customer feedback, when and how was it received?
What are the top three issues being raised by customers?
Diary of a Kaizen Warrior 