Why Lean - The Customers Perspective

Why Lean – The Customer’s Perspective

If you want to know why Lean is necessary, you could ask a state employee doing the work, and he or she might say it’s because the systems of government are a mess. And they’d be right.

But we can also see why Lean is necessary by talking to our customers, the people who depend on government for our products and services – the outputs that state employees deliver.

Our customers don’t care that we are “government,” subject to some special pass as if we’re incapable of ever performing well. And they don’t compare one agency to another because for them we’re just the government. Their benchmark for comparison’s sake is the Fortune 500, the very best leading edge companies operating in business today … the ones that deliver just what the customer wants every time, always getting it right the first time, and all at the speed of now.

Our customers want their experience with state agencies to be just as good and just as fast, and they can’t understand why we can’t deliver like they expect us to.

Here’s the bottom line: As State of Arizona employees, we cannot ignore our customers, because our customers are the very reason we are here. We have a responsibility to serve them with the utmost professionalism, speed and efficiency and applying Lean principles to our processes will help us do that.