ASQ Lean Enterprise Division will host the Lean Service Design Program

Dec. 11, 2012 - PRLog -- (ASQ) Lean Enterprise Division will host the webinar Lean Service Design: Closing the Gaps between Perception and Reality on Tuesday, January 8, 2013 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM CST.

Lean Service Design changes the way you think about business. No longer can companies focus their efforts on process improvements. Instead, they must engage the customer in use of their product/service rather than analyzing tasks for improvement. We must change our mindset from thinking about design at the end of the supply chain to make it look good and add a few appealing features. Instead, we must move design and the user themselves to co-create or co-produce the desired experience to the beginning.

We typically think of Service as a verb or an activity that is consumed by our customers. We think of Service in forms of organizational functions such as Engineering, Purchasing, Shipping, Marketing, Accounting, IT, Human Resources. When we set out to improve one of these functions, we look at how we do the work. We focus on our own activity. The carryover of product thinking that better, faster, cheaper wins is a total misnomer. The focus on our own activity encourages internal thinking and misplaces our priorities. While addressing services from this viewpoint may seem to be productive and worthwhile, it misses the point in design. If we intend to make services profitable, we must accept that customers do not care how we do our work. They might not even care that we are incompetent at certain functions. Customers want us to provide a service to help them achieve a desired outcome. However, have we designed our services to demonstrate that value?

Lean Service Design Trilogy teaches us how to…
· Think of services as products or deliverables.
· Close the performance gap between customers and your organization.
· Create services that can be part of a package.
· Create services that are not only supporting but also self-supporting.
· Create services that are cost leaders not cost losers.
· Create opportunities through services.
· Create revenue through services

For more information, visit Business901 (http://business901.com/lean-service-design/)

American Society of Quality (ASQ)
ASQ’s Vision: By making quality a global priority, an organizational imperative, and a personal ethic, ASQ becomes the community for everyone who seeks quality concepts, technology, or tools to improve themselves and their world.
ASQ’s Mission: To increase the use and impact of quality in response to the diverse needs of the world.

(ASQ) Lean Enterprise Division is a global network of professionals helping individuals and organizations apply proven and leading edge Lean principles and practices to achieve dramatic results for your personal and organizational success.

About Business901 (http://business901.com):provides direction in areas such as Lean Marketing and Achieving Expert Status. Joe Dager is president of Business901, a firm specializing in bringing the continuous improvement process to the sales and marketing arena. He takes his process thinking of over thirty years in marketing within a wide variety of industries and applies it through Lean Marketing Concepts.

Joe is a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt and has participated with companies involved in retail, manufacturing, software and professional services along their Quality Journey. In these companies, Joe developed and implemented sales and marketing strategies. Always being a process thinker, he attached Lean to the way of implementing sales and marketing and has advanced those practices through Design Thinking and Service Design concepts. The Business901 Blog and Podcast include many leading edge thinkers and been featured numerous times for its contributions to the Bloomberg’s Business Week Exchange. Joe has authored four books with the most recent published this year, The Lean Engagement Team.