This post was inspired by an article published June 1, 2022 by Rick Bohan and Ron Jacques on https://www.industryweek.com/ , titled “Lean Is Futile If Customers Come Last”. The article is a critical view on some bad practices “ignoring the experience of existing and prospective customers as they try to work with you” while pretending to be a Lean company. The original article can be read here: https://www.industryweek.com/operations/continuous-improvement/article/21243082/lean-is-futile-if-customers-come-last

Is Lean Always Futile If Customers Come Last?

I like to describe myself as a critical and logical thinker, all too happy to hone my skills when I come across wobbly assumptions, lack of clarity or ambiguity in statements. In a kind of reflex reaction, I immediately questioned the original title (prior to having read the text) rephrasing it “Is Lean Always Futile If Customers Come Last?”, with an emphasis on “always”.

Here are my thoughts.

Lean’s customer centricity

It seems to me that Lean’s customer centricity as it is highlighted nowadays is a relatively recent intellectual construct, after the markets shifted from scarcity to abundance, roughly in the early 1980s. It is about the same period when Lean was revealed to the West, mass production and seller’s market were already gone and customers were now to be attracted and kept loyal, for competition among vendors grew fiercer.

Before that, in a seller’s market and scarcity of goods, I assume the customer was somewhere in the background but not the center of sellers’ and manufacturers’ concerns. In many vendors’ minds then, customers had to be happy to (deserve to) be served. Improvements in productivity and operations were foremost internally oriented, for increasing profits and growing the company. I doubt that many companies boasted about putting the customer in the center and working hard to satisfy him/her in the 1950s.

Things changed with the switch to abundance and buyer’s market. With a growing display of choices available, customers were empowered to choose and providers reduced to be one among many. With customers now king, it was mandatory to take care of them or to be banned from competition.

Yet this change did not happen in all industries at the time nor at the same speed. Besides, exceptions can still be found.

Monopoly

Think about cases where the vendor has a monopoly or nearly monopoly. For customers it’s a take-it-or-leave-it choice. Not happy with the way the vendor treats you? Upset by the long waiting time? Angry about poor customer support? Maybe, but what choice is left?

The vendor can use (almost) all Lean principles and tools for his/her own benefit without much consideration for customers and from this vendor’s perspective it would not appear futile. Even investors and stockholders may endorse such a choice, for they will benefit from it as well. That is, as long as the monopoly lasts.

Scarcity reloaded

What if all the sudden scarcity is back again? Say there is an urgent and important need for a specific medical treatment or defense system and very few makers can provide it?

• Note for the readers in the future: these lines have been written in June 2022, after the peak (?) of the COVID-19 pandemic and amidst the Russian aggression of Ukraine.

Those makers should use Lean methods and tools to deliver more and faster, but if they “ignore the experience of existing and prospective customers as they try to work with them”, it will probably not harm them much, nor would those customers ressent too much coming last. The urgency is about getting the products fast and en masse, full stop.

Non returning customers

Another case in which using Lean techniques and tools regardless of customer’s experience is not an issue are businesses with non returning customers. Think about restaurants in very touristic places. There are plenty of customers but very few likely to return. Except a bad review and negative word-of-mouth, which many such restaurants can probably survive, why should they provide an extraordinary experience when their primary goal is to make profit?

Conclusion

From a mere critical and logical point of view, the statement “Lean is Always Futile If Customers Come Last” must be rejected as false, as exceptions can be found. Replace “Always” by “frequently”, “most often” or even “Almost Always” and critical wordsmiths like me (me being French, non-native English speaker), will keep quiet.