How to ensure your development is heading in the right direction? 🔍

During my career, I have encountered various mindsets regarding what processes are and how they should be described and designed. One of these mindsets has been a desire to define processes as function-specific. I take my hat off to those who understand the importance of processes, strive to develop the business, and disciplinedly implement processes.

But how do function-specific processes work when you want to improve the company's overall operations from the customer's perspective? 🤔 The risk of sub-optimisation is high. Even if work becomes smoother within a function, the work of other functions can lead to the wrong compromises for the customer. It is a well-known concept in systems theory that maximising sub-processes does not result in a maximal outcome for the whole.

Customer-centric process design

Manufacturing, particularly the automotive industry, has long traditions and advanced practices for process development. In manufacturing operations, production lines, suppliers, and in some cases, other stakeholders form a value chain that generates the end products the customer receives. In his books, Mike Rother has described value stream mapping, which helps visualise the entire value chain and its development opportunities.

Rother’s book Toyota Kata (2010) describes one of the functionalities through which Toyota ensures development is correctly directed: “In Toyota’s mindset, the point in the value stream where a target state is first established is preferably a ‘pacemaker’ process rather than upstream ‘manufacturing’ processes.” This is a smart way to ensure that process development is steered as close to the customer as possible.

It is even better when process design starts with the customer and their needs. The customer has their own process, with related goals, needs, and desires. The organisation's activities are hung and designed around the customer. The process ends with the output delivered to the customer. Excellent – and well-designed – processes are also planned and reflected upon regularly. 🏆

Understanding the customer's process and directing development

Understanding the customer's process is the key to excellent customer service. When customer needs and wishes are the priority, they can be met in a way that serves them continuously. Preparing for the customer's process, needs, and wishes is central to the task list of business core processes.

Lean thinking, which originated from the Toyota Production System, provides great resources, methods, and tools for the continuous improvement of operations in manufacturing, service businesses, and any organisation. In Lean, waste refers to activities that do not produce value for the customer. Eliminating waste from a core process designed from customer-to-customer is one of the important and liberating realisations. – When waste is removed from well-designed customer-to-customer processes, you cannot go wrong. 💡

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