Customers – “You must do business my way!”

Reading Art Byrnes's book "The Lean Turnaround" --- I found the following: "How much time do we spend trying to get our customers to conform to the way we do things, instead of trying to configure ourselves to be responsive?"

Before I even heard of Lean Thinking, many years back, I worked for a company that had a very cumbersome process of quoting products for their customers. Basically all quotes started with a clean sheet of paper. Depending on parameters, as provided by the customer, a standard set of calculations were required to configure our product and provide a solution for the project. The process usually took 6 - 10 days. When quote activity was high, the process went to 10 - 20 days for a response to the customer.

After several weeks on the job, I was thoroughly frustrated with the process and began to devise a faster more automatic approach to quoting. I eventually had the process down to 1 day and then knocked that to less than 10 minutes. 

Management fought me over and over in the fact that they believed my process was mistake-prone. My work was challenged and checked over and over. Yes, mistakes were made as I refined the process. However, many more mistakes were being made at the "Old" quoting method.

Having accomplished this, I believe it started me on my Lean Journey without even being aware of it. Our customers liked the quick response and our sales dramatically picked up.

Creating better processes to more quickly accommodate customers is imperative! Looking at all aspects of a business and continually improving is important.  

Always be asking the question internally and especially externally - What can we do to be better, faster, more responsive, and easier to do business with?  Stop the thinking process --- Customers - "You must do business my way!"

Good luck with your Lean Journey!