Value from the customer perspective results when your organization provides what the customer wants (quality and innovative products or services), when they want it (on time, every time), where they want it (nearest to the point of use), and at a competitive price. In other words, whenever quality, service or innovation increase while cost or time decrease, additional value is being realized by the customer.

Value from an employee perspective is the result of creating a culture of respect for employees that includes training and development focused on transforming all employees into managers of their processes, skilled problem solvers, and most importantly, problem preventers. By understanding non-value-adding activities and the influence of variation on their processes, highly-skilled and actively engaged employees will provide products and services valued by customers.

Value from a stakeholder perspective occurs by creating long-term stability benefiting customers, suppliers, employees and shareholders. The effect of your organization’s stability locally, regionally and globally must also be considered.

Value for shareholders includes providing financial return-on-investment and long-term wealth maximization greater than other opportunities offer. By truly understanding perceived value through voice of customer data, and delivering products and services more effectively and efficiently than your competition, the resulting financial gains will delight shareholders.

So how do you position your organization and all those affected for long term success? By creating a culture passionately focused on eliminating non-value-adding waste and minimizing process variation by embracing and integrating lean and six sigma philosophies and techniques. The resulting improvements in speed, quality and lower costs will drive key customer satisfaction and business metrics to unprecedented levels of performance.

Of course, and as the saying goes, value is in the eye of the beholder. With this in mind it must be recognized that organizations are attempting to hit a moving target as perceptions of value constantly change. However, those with agile and flexible product development, supply chain, and administrative processes find themselves in the enviable position of being able to respond quickly and efficiently to such changes.

Do you have any thoughts or experience with helping parts of the business understand how to add value?   Please visit our blog to add your comments by following the link: Our Blog.

Interested in more ways to improve operations and increase earnings at the same time? We invite you to download our white paper “Targeted Lean Six Sigma". You are also welcome to browse the list of free white papers and other articles at Free Resources.

If you have a topic that you would like addressed, or an Insight you would like to pass along, e-mail us at: Jack.Rink@rmdonovan.com

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