Lean: a path to excellent customer service.

• Author: Britz-Parker, Bernadette
• Position: Management & Careers

Who are your customers? The answer varies by position. If you are a city finance director, your customers are your city's constituents, of course, but they are also members of the city commission, employees in the finance department, and other department leaders. To achieve maximum value and efficiency from Lean methodologies, governments need to fully understand what excellent customer service means to each customer.

Organizations sometimes spend a great deal of time and money in pursuit of goals that aren't the main priority for its customers. Lean focuses on finding the most effective way of delivering value--that is, what customers really want--rather than what the provider thinks they want. To deliver on this promise, Lean uses a five-step process to find and correct the underlying causes of problems (termed "bottlenecks") in a process. There is no such thing as a quick fix, although simple fixes may be possible once the problem is identified. Lean's goal is ensuring a consistent, ongoing approach to workplace improvement. Consequently, a significant part of a Lean process centers on answering these two questions:

1. Who is the customer?

2. What does the customer value most?

THE CHANGING DEFINITIONS OF 'VALUE'

When using Lean, everyone in the process is both the customer of the last person who touched the process the provider for the next person in the process. The definition of "value" changes along with the individual's role in the process. The following example demonstrates this concept.

Process to Be Analyzed: Vendors are not paid within the agreed-upon 30 day timeframe, which may add costs for the jurisdiction, including finance charges and lost discounts for on-time payment.

Background: The finance department generally pays invoices within 15 days, but first they require an approved invoice from the department that contracted for the goods or services. This can take as long as 60 days, which means vendors wait as long as 75 days to be paid.

The Parties Involved: The vendor, the finance department, the requisition clerk, and the requisition department manager.

* Vendor: Customer of the government agency's finance department; provider to the agency. The vendor becomes frustrated about not being paid on time and calls the finance department every week to ask the finance department secretary to follow up with the requisition clerk, who hasn't processed the invoice, to get an account number and approval on the line item to be charged.

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