The teasing will continue but not for long. No worries, I will share the process to keep your workspace, shop, business and home clean, organized and productive. You will learn the secret weapon to creating a lean environment.
However like any good learning it must be built upon a foundation. For you, the foundation began when you read the previous lean shop post – The first element. This is a principle that is often recited by businesses but rarely followed. The objective is customer first. However, knowing the objective is easier than meeting the objective. Achieving customer satisfaction is not enough to obtain and retain your customers. You must find ways to exceed customer satisfaction and do so consistently. It is this consistency that guarantees growth and profitability.
The key to achieving consistency and your objective is standardization. Standardization comes in many forms. If you are running a company standardization may be:
- job descriptions – defining the expectation of an associates role
- standard operating procedures – general guidelines on how to perform a set of tasks
- specific work instructions – details of how to operate a piece of machinery or use a jig to ensure consistent results.
If you are working as an individual you may not document your responsibilities or use of your equipment but if you want full benefit of a lean environment, standardization of your approach and processes is no less important.
From a business’ perspective, standardization is important because it provides a common vision or “language” that everyone, associates and supervisors can relate to. Documented standardization is the guide to training and development. But most importantly, be it an individual in their own shop or a staffed production environment, standardization is the platform for improvement!
This is key…Standardization!
Business or individual, we all want to do more, better, faster, with less time, energy and effort… if possible. But we cannot consistently improve upon our past performance if our process is erratic. If every process is completed by whim, if every task is completed in a unique manner, every customer interaction random, any efforts to improve cannot be sustained. If you have standardized a process or task today, even if it is not the best, fastest, or takes more energy or effort than necessary… if it is standardized and only if it is standardized do we have the platform necessary for improvement. Over time, with many slight adjustments this imperfect task will improve. Improve in efficiency and improve in quality. As your tasks and processes improve your customers experience becomes more consistent.
As an individual artist or crafts-person most will find intrinsic value in doing a good job and even greater pride if you perform better tomorrow than you did today. If you own a company or manage a workforce, you want your organization to perform better tomorrow than it did today. Your customer expectations will never diminish they will only continue to increase.
Achieving your goal of customer retention is not easy but it is possible with standardized processes and procedures as a platform to build from. With the consistency of standardized processes you can then focus on how to improve them.
My thanks go to Casper!
