Lean Manufacturing Principles — The Customer Pulls Value
How would you go about answering that question?
I’m sure there are lots of possible answers to these questions. But most of them are wrong.
Perhaps, the single most fundamental principle of Lean Manufacturing is that you are producing value when you give customers what they want, when they want it. Everything else is waste.
If you don’t know exactly what your customers most want, and have the capacity to deliver it at just that moment, and a price they are willing to pay, you aren’t producing real value.
Producing what the customer wants ahead of time is waste because they might not really want it, or they might want it configured differently — and that means re-work which is just another name for waste.
If you are pushing change on your users, you are bound to encounter resistance and therefore waste both your time and your users time. If on the other hand, you lead your users to better understand what they need, and get them to ask you for it, then they pull value from the system. And that means less resistance to change, less wasted time, and more user satisfaction.