Understanding the Needs of the Customer is Crucial | Operational Excellence Quick Hits

Speaker 1: (00:04)
How do we achieve operational license? It starts by understanding the needs of the customer. Okay so, we need to understand what are the needs of our customer? And, of course, customers might have different needs. Different customers might have different needs. But we need to understand all the needs of the customer. Okay so, that’s the first criteria, we have a customer, we understand what their needs are.

Speaker 1: (00:29)
So, I’m amazed at how many companies I go into that don’t understand their customer needs. Okay so, a lot of work needs to be done here on really understanding what are the needs of the customers? Yes, they tell you what their needs are, but there’s also needs that they don’t tell you about. So, we call those implied needs. So, things that they just assumed that maybe you know, but maybe you don’t know. Okay so, we really need to make sure we understand the needs of the customer.

Speaker 1: (01:00)
Then, those feed into your organization. Okay so, the needs of the customer are the inputs to start designing your organization to satisfy those needs. Okay so, on the output of that, we have some level of customer satisfaction. So, hopefully, we have a high level of customer satisfaction. Sometimes we have customers that aren’t so satisfied, but the goal of operational excellence is to provide more value than our competitors are providing. So, if we want to capture more market share, whoever our customers are, we need to provide more value than what they can get from our competitors, or a substitute product or service.

Speaker 1: (01:50)
Okay so, within the organization we have different functions. So, we look at three basic pillars in a company, we have the finance function, we have the sales and marketing function, and we have the operations function. So, the operations function is the one that converts inputs into outputs that satisfy our customers. So, we call those, the value added activities. So, it doesn’t matter if you’re a service organization, a manufacturer, or healthcare provider, there’s actions, or steps that you need to do to convert your inputs to desired output to meet our customer’s needs. Okay so, those three functions need to work in concert with one another.

Speaker 1: (02:35)
And so, in the middle here we have leadership’s role. So, leadership’s role is to make sure that those functions are operating in conjunction with one another to meet the customer’s needs.