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What drives market share? Customer loyalty. Great brands know how to connect deeply with customers, and captivate their fan base by consistently, and sometimes ingeniously, balancing the triumvirate of Q C D (quality, cost, delivery). That extends not only to the product or service itself, but to customer service processes and attitudes that build loyalty.
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The questions companies bring to us today generally converge on one primary theme—culture change.
“We’ve been ‘doing lean’ for years, but it hasn’t really taken hold across the organization.”
“We have a few people who ‘get it’ but we can’t seem to replicate that enthusiasm in others.”
“We make improvements in an area during a kaizen event, but months later we find that we can’t sustain the gains.”
In the past few years, as the pharmaceutical industry has come to grips with patent expiries, declining revenue, increasing global competition, aging infrastructure, and widely publicized quality problems, more serious lean efforts have taken root at companies across the industry.
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Reshoring is increasing, according to some studies, as companies in the U.S., U.K., and other Western countries take a fresh look at their product and service sourcing strategies in the wake of the global recession. While some pundits dispute the extent of the manufacturing resurgence, as well as the net impact on jobs, there are early signs of a trend.
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Visual Management is a cornerstone principle of lean implementation. As defined in LeanSpeak a visual management system means “systematic attention to the goal of companywide integration of visual operation, including workplace organization and standardization (5S), visual display, visual metrics, and visual control.
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As social, financial, and regulatory pressures to eliminate environmental waste increase, “zero waste” strategies are moving higher on business operations priority lists.
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In the world of lean transformation, a type of complacent behavioral pattern emerges around kaizen events. As Jim Vatalaro points out in his most recent blog posting, “Solving the ‘Sustainment Problem’,” many organizations fall victim to event-driven improvement:
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More than ten years ago, Volkwsagen launched a transparent factory in
downtown Dresden. Its “handmade” Phaeton luxury sedan is assembled there.
The annals of 2012 include the stories of two notable turnarounds in Japanese companies…
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In October, Hewlett-Packard’s six-year run as the dominant maker of personal computers ended when China’s Lenovo group (owner of the former IBM PC unit) edged out HP in shipments of PCs for the previous quarter.
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