Tuesday, February 15, 2005

Thoughts on DOI #2 - Customers

Continuing my explanation of the Declaration of Interdependence with the second statement focused on customers.

#2 - Customers

• We deliver reliable results by engaging customers in frequent interactions and shared ownership

We wanted to capture the idea of close partnership with customers. The term partnership tends to get misused. In the same way that executives want you to “delight customers”, they often also want you to “partner” with them without fully understanding what that means. Partner means to align the supply chain’s interests and focus on the end consumer. This is how Japanese keiretsu work. It creates a mechanism to treat the whole value chain as a single system and optimize for the system not the parts.

We also wanted to capture the quality assurance that comes from frequent customer touch and feedback.

Together these two aspects of putting the customer’s skin in the game through (inter-)active partnership and high touch gives us a mechanism to deliver reliable results. The word reliable embraces concepts like repeatable, dependable and trustworthy without the historical baggage that the word repeatable carries in process circles.