1.6 Conclusion

As a business professional, your job description is simple: You create customer value! When you do your job well, your company makes things more efficiently and effectively than rivals. The result: Customers choose to buy your products instead of those produced by rivals. You grow your market share and earn a profit. You can then invest this profit in new products or expanded production capacity. Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?

As we look forward to the rest of the book—where we will introduce you to Lean Six Sigma tools and explore the details of Lean Six Sigma implementation—let’s invite you to keep two points in mind.

1. Seek Operational Excellence Everywhere. Sometimes people get into the mindset that operational excellence refers only to manufacturing or service operations. The reality is that the disciplined, creative methodology that we will work through in subsequent chapters can be applied to almost any business process to improve efficiency and deliver a better customer experience.

   These tools are especially important across the plan, order, source, transform, fulfill, return, and orchestration processes that comprise the Association for Supply Chain Management Supply Chain Operations Reference (SCOR) model shown in Figure 1.4.

   Figure 1.4: The ASCM SCOR Model

2. Or Else. Think back to our epigraph: “Operations is either a competitive weapon or a corporate millstone. It is seldom neutral.” If operations aren’t excellent, they will be a millstone hanging from your neck. You don’t want that to happen. Why, you ask? Because there is always someone who wants to put you out of business—especially in today’s global marketplace! Do you remember A&P, Bethlehem Steel, Compaq Computer, Digital Equipment Corporation, or PanAm? Each was once an industry leader. Each has also disappeared from the competitive landscape.

The lesson is clear. You have to excel at making and delivering things! Otherwise, you have nothing of value to offer to customers.