Harvard Business Review:"lean service pursued brilliantly by Fujitsu"
There’s a difference, and we know what it is. As Harvard Business Review recently said, lean service is being pursued brilliantly by Fujitsu.
"Why don't we just fix the thing?"
How industrial thinking is changing IT services, for good.
Visit a factory in trouble and you’ll probably trip over its problems; over-stocked inventories, excess scrap, badly sited equipment. It’s harder for an outsider to spot inefficiencies in a service organisation, but Fujitsu’s pioneers of “Lean thinking” are empowering frontline staff not only to detect problems, but to fix the processes that produce them.
The now-famous Lean techniques were originally developed by Toyota as a route to cost-effective mass-customisation. The key principles include cutting waste in all parts of the value chain and giving every worker the right to stop the production line when he or she finds a mistake. Rather than reworking individual cars, Toyota workers halt production and work together to fix the underlying problem. Toyota created a value chain of linked suppliers, all of whom have a clear stake in making the company more successful and they all continue to reap the rewards of the greater efficiencies brought about by Lean.
Now the Lean movement is embracing service organisations – the white-collar factories that represent an increasing proportion of business value. Fujitsu’s experience of applying Lean ideas to IT service shows that service organisations can generate great waves of positive change throughout a community of connected companies, so that everyone raises their game.
Getting in step
The traditional IT services world can be cumbersome and restrictive. Old-style service agreements set the scope of service in concrete and quickly become obstructive to real customer needs. A prime example is the definition of call-outs for IT equipment repair. Given the relentless downward spiral in most hardware costs, replacement is often a quicker and cheaper option than repair – for the service supplier as well as the customer. Recognising what is valuable to the client and aiming to serve the underlying business need rather than simply carrying out the standard solution is a key benefit of Lean thinking.
Lean practice encourages players to understand the dynamics of those they work with, so that waste can be eliminated all along the value chain. In the manufacturing world, there’s little point in creating just-in-time processes within your own boundaries if your suppliers are still dumping large shipments of components on you, or your customers still make large, mixed orders – and frequent returns. On the services side, co-operation across the value chain can root out inefficiencies for all players, delivering productivity gains and bottom-line savings for everyone.
At the core of Lean thinking is the recognition that those who work with customer queries and issues every day are the true experts in service delivery. They detect patterns in the events they deal with and develop strategies to deal with them. Workarounds quickly become “tribal knowledge” and soon the organisation on the ground is very different from the official flowchart – yet constrained by it. But by using the concept of kaizen, Fujitsu ensures that fixes are created collaboratively, applied consistently and baked into the organisation’s standard processes. One translation of kaizen is simply “take it apart and put back together in a better way”.
Break out of the pattern
As the service team improves its response times and removes whole classes of incoming issues, it can also turn its attention to customer processes that might be generating problems. So, for example, the service team may detect a pattern of repeated change requests that suggests a flawed procedure on the customer side. The team can raise this with the customer and work with the customer to address the anomaly. The result is a cleaner process within the customer organisation, together with a saving on the customer’s support contract.
There’s a close relationship between Lean thinking and the idea of the “real time enterprise”. The traditional big business way is to design a product, estimate the market, build a vast supply – and then watch most of it rust. The real time organisation does away with this monumental – and highly risky – approach. Instead, the business monitors its environment, analyses what it hears and responds accordingly. To do so, it must have a highly flexible organisation structure and a set of capabilities that it can reconfigure on the fly. It’s got to be Lean to be fit.
Lean is a very down-to-earth way of swapping a hierarchical organisation designed to suit the supplier’s convenience for a truly flexible organisation driven by customer needs.
As customers, we’re not fooled by claims that a supplier is “listening” when we’re bounced from agent to agent, or forced to navigate a complex phone menu. We know we’re being channelled into a pigeon-hole – and we resent doing the work involved. Properly applied, Lean thinking tears down these rigid structures and puts the supplier organisation at the command of the customer. And that can mean not only clearer and faster solutions to customer needs, but also drastically reduced costs in support.
Beyond the war on waste
While it’s tempting to see Lean techniques as simply a war on waste, the drive for efficiency isn’t the whole story. Greater efficiency leads to greater productivity, but also greater clarity of purpose – which in turn frees organisations to really listen to their customers, and to see the world from the customer’s point of view. And because Lean techniques are designed to remove processes or improve them rather than patch faulty outcomes, the service organisation becomes progressively attuned to its customers and can begin to offer value beyond its traditional limits.
Fujitsu sees Lean thinking as a distinct step in the company’s evolution towards ever-better service, and as a practical commitment to the betterment of the many value chains in which it operates. We’re therefore implementing the Lean philosophy within a comprehensive approach known as ‘Sense and Respond’, to make sure that Lean thinking becomes engrained in every aspect of an organisation’s activities.
“Lean” is an attitude that anyone can buy into, and everyone can apply. Lean techniques don’t call for complex technological support or mind-bending “employee reorientation”. Embedding Lean thinking within an organisation is certainly no quick fix and requires a holistic approach to transformation. But it’s a journey well worth taking. Going Lean means getting back to the reason we’re here in the first place – to help people achieve great things, every day.
