Handbook Lean Solutions

Pioneering work by Jones and Womack on Lean consumption and customer value.

This is perhaps the most underestimated book in Lean literature!
In their bestseller Lean Thinking, Jim Womack and Dan Jones, our LGN colleagues who introduced Lean outside Toyota, introduced five core principles of Lean. However, the first principle, customer value, is a difficult one. So what exactly is 'customer value'? How do you determine customer value?

In this book Womack and Jones elaborate on this. They start by broadening their view from production (the focus of many improvement initiatives) to consumption, i.e. from the customer's point of view. They then formulate a number of principles from the customer's point of view. Each of these principles is dealt with in its own chapter, and illustrated with real practical examples of how this has been shaped by certain companies. Again and again, it turns out that better customer value goes hand in hand with more efficient production - so no trade-off or trade-off is necessary, provided you put on the right Lean glasses. In this way, they come up with simple but revolutionary ideas about delivering products and services. Some of the insights they introduce are:

• how more and more companies are using consumers unnecessarily as a free labour force
• how complex consumption has become - as consumers, we have more and more suppliers of ever smaller solutions (consider: how many online accounts do you have?) and each of these services has to be searched, purchased, installed, maintained, repaired, updated and recycled.
• how most service desks in their current form are more inefficient, also for the service provider.
• how all forms of queuing, the 'hub-and-spoke' design in aviation and the XL suburban supermarkets are typical examples of mass production thinking.

In passing, the authors introduce various new or existing ways of looking, for example, the box score, the milk run and the consumption map.

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