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You are here: Lean Six Sigma Home » Service Operations » Lean Consumption: Don’t Waste the Customer’s Time
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Lean Consumption: Don’t Waste the Customer’s Time

by Pete Abilla on June 29, 2010

The second principle in Lean Consumption (or Lean for Service Operations is1:

  • Don’t Waste the Customer’s Time

Obvious at first glance, but what seems obvious to us or common sense is surprisingly not common practice at all.

Indeed, a good majority of my posts are actually a look at waiting or queueing. Why? Because it is so common-place and there are queues and waiting all around us. If that’s any indication to what is important to the service provider, it’s safe to conclude that customers waiting less is not a priority for most service providers.

Lean for Service Operations takes a different look at waiting:

how does waiting look from the customer’s perspective?

In practice, this question is answered through the creation of a Lean Consumption Map, as we show on the introduction to Lean for Service Operations article. In that map, we show the “Before” stage. In what follows, I’ll show the “After”:

lean-consumption-shmula-abilla-after

So what changed? I’ll answer that question in succeeding posts on Lean for Service Operations, but the point I want to make now is the difference in time – a reduction in waiting time. Specifically, the service providers didn’t see a reduction in waiting time, but the customer did.

Practically, this means happier customers that will likely return again because of rapid and complete service.

Series on Lean Services

  1. Introduction to Lean Services
  2. Lean Services and Solving the Customer’s Problem Completely
  3. Don’t Waste the Customer’s Time – in Lean Services
  4. Provide Exactly What is Wanted
  5. Provide Exactly What is Wanted and Where it’s Wanted
  6. Provide What the Customer Wants, When it’s Wanted, and Where it’s Wanted
  7. Lean Services and How to Aggregate Solutions
  8. Lean Services Summary
  1. the principles of Lean for Service Operations are: Solve the customer’s problem completely by insuring that all the goods and services work, and work together, Don’t waste the customer’s time, Provide exactly what the customer wants, Provide what’s wanted exactly where it’s wanted, Provide what’s wanted where it’s wanted exactly when it’s wanted, Continually aggregate solutions to reduce the customer’s time and hassle. ↩

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{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }

Ammar A. M. July 2, 2010 at 5:31 am

Dear Pete,

I’ve been following your blog for quite some time and have enjoyed the crisp and informative articles you post every so often.

But the article you have presented here is something I do not completely agree with.

I think it’s a very theoretical situation where we are only cutting down or aggregating the waiting time.

In reality, however, it is more time consuming since the article does not consider adequately the processing time or the ability of Jiffy Lube to be able to handle work that is the responsibility of the state.

I may be wrong. It’s just an observation.
But I’d like to understand how we can better solve the problem.

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