How do you align your lean strategy with customer needs?

Understanding your customers’ needs is not just a critical aspect of lean strategy; it’s foundational. A customer focus ensures that lean efforts are customer-centric and that every improvement made is about delivering perceived value to the end customer. Creating value through lean will drive customer satisfaction, and brand loyalty. By putting the customer at the center, lean becomes a powerful tool for businesses to stay competitive, remain relevant and continuously improve the products and services they offer.

Aligning lean strategy with customer needs is essential. All too often I hear of companies not listening to the Voice of the Customer (VOC). Lean principles focus on eliminating waste and continuously improving. These values also include what the customer is willing to pay for. A company can start with using these two principles: • Thoroughly understanding your customers' needs and expectations. Collect customer feedback through surveys and other feedback channels. • Segment your customer base to identify different needs and preferences. By consistently aligning your lean strategy with customer needs, a company can create a customer-centric organization that delivers value, gain loyalty, and remains competitive.

Traditional manufacturing environments focus on the product. However, the Lean manufacturing environment focuses on the customer. customer can be internal as well as external. Therefore, every process needs to be designed based on customer/ Client expectations and satisfaction. When considering the material flow from the supplier to the customer all manufacturing activities in the organization need to align with the immediate and end customers' expectations.

Value Stream Mapping is one of the major activities that an organization can conduct to identify the current situation. Actually, it is like a Macro analysis of the organization and it is like the view of the organization from 30,000 feet height. The VSM not only connects the organization's internal processes. But also it connects with the customers and suppliers also. Mainly there are two flows in VSM material flow and Information flow. After drawing the VSM, it clearly illustrates the Value-adding and Non-value-adding activities in the organization and it assists in reducing the non-value elements and enhancing the VA to NVA ratio. Also, it facilitates streamlining the information flow by eliminating repeat communications.

According to Lean, it is required to satisfy the customer demand only. Most of the organizations run the push system and through the VSM it clearly can observed. However push system creates unwanted WIPs and based on that organization has to face issues like, Problem hiding, Quality Issues, Waiting, Unnecessary motions, etc. Therefore it is required to implement a pull system on the manufacturing floor to enhance several factors like problem surfacing, enhance the Quality Rate, Reduce the Unnecessory stress, Overproduction, etc. Usually, after drawing the current VSM, the organization can recognise where the push system happened and they can convert push material flow to pull material flow by introducing Kanaban, Supermarket, Heijunka, etc.

It is a dream to improve the organization without employee engagement. to sustain the organization it is required to satisfy the customers. To reach that it is required to align the organizational process based on the customer requirements. The prime responsibilities of the HR department are to recruit suitable people and develop the employees currently working in the organization. When enhancing the employee knowledge and Skills, they start to act on processes through process improvements, problem-solving, Kaizen, etc Improved employees also make the correct decisions. Then top management can empower the employees working at different levels in the organization structure. it supports motivation and leads to the organization's success.

After clearly understanding the customer requirements, Based on the organization's vision and key objectives, Required to set a proper measuring system and specified goals. Usually, in lean consider the SQDCM mechanism. measuring system should include Safety, Quality, Delivery, Cost and Morale related KPIs. it is required to frequently monitor the status and it will support identifying the deviations. When identifying the deviations, there are several tools to analyse the problem. Fishbone, Pareto charts, Scatter Diagrams, 5 Why analysis some of them. management of the organization wants to address the issues identified through analysis and it is like a continuous journey. when reach some level, plan for the next levels.