How can lean boost sales?
There are two ways of looking at this: one, applying lean thinking to the sales function, or two, increasing sales with lean. As I don’t know much about selling, I’ll tackle the latter – how can lean boost sales without touching the sales function? If we’re not focusing on selling, the product had better sell itself!
There are four very large challenges here:
– How can we grasp customer preferences to design a product they’ll like (and buy)?
– How can we design the product to deliver these functional performances as well as genera hassle-free robustness?
– How can we make sure production builds the product as designed without inserting unnecessary faults in the manufacturing process (which also involves suppliers)?
Finally, how can we react to adverse publicity by spotting problems in the market and fixing them before they affect product reputation?
As far as I can tell, there are specific lean answers to each of these questions – but I’m going a bit on a limb here as I agree with the original question and these topics have definitely not been researched enough in the lean movement.
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