{"id":25435,"date":"2017-12-07T14:29:00","date_gmt":"2017-12-07T14:29:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kepner-tregoe.com\/5-things-you-can-do-to-make-your-oe-efforts-more-customer-centric\/"},"modified":"2025-07-16T15:14:00","modified_gmt":"2025-07-16T15:14:00","slug":"5-things-you-can-do-to-make-your-oe-efforts-more-customer-centric","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kepner-tregoe.com\/nl\/blogs\/5-things-you-can-do-to-make-your-oe-efforts-more-customer-centric\/","title":{"rendered":"5 Things you can do to make your OE efforts more customer centric"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Operational Excellence isn\u2019t just about profitability and making money for the company.\u00a0 At the end of the day, the reason your company exists is to create the products and services that customers need and value at a price they are willing to pay.\u00a0 Yes, profitability is important \u2013 it is what encourages you to stay in business, but profits can only be made if you first make the sale.\u00a0 Here are 5 things you can do to make your OE efforts more customer centric and increase the opportunities to make profits:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ol class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><strong>Focus on the things that increase the value of products and services.<\/strong>\u00a0 There is a difference between \u2018change\u2019 and \u2018improvement\u2019 \u2013 its all about impact.\u00a0 As you evaluate options for where to apply your limited resources, look for the opportunities to add meaningful and lasting value to the products and services that your customers consume.\u00a0 That value may come in the form of features, timeliness of production\/delivery, quality\/consistency of the offerings or price improvements \u2013 the key is to look at how the change will impact the customer.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>Consider \u2018real\u2019 customer needs, not just what they ask for.<\/strong>\u00a0 Competitive advantage comes from anticipating the needs that customers will have and making the products and services to meet those needs available at the time the need is realized.\u00a0 Most customers aren\u2019t able to articulate what their future needs are going to be (because they don\u2019t know) \u2013 they can only articulate what they want to purchase today.\u00a0 Creating or changing products and services takes time, so it is important to frame the customer\u2019s stated wants in the context of the environment and project how changes in the environment will impact their needs over time.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>Understand you are in a competition and customers have choices<\/strong>. With very few exceptions, in a free-market economy, customers have choices on what products and services to consume.\u00a0 This is important because not only are you trying to meet your customer\u2019s needs, you need to do it in a way that out performs your competitors (better, cheaper, faster, more consistently, etc).\u00a0 It is the customer who decides the winner of this competition (through their purchase behavior), so the more in-tune you can be to what customers value, the more likely you are to earn their business.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>Identify and eliminate non-value-add features and activities from your operations and offerings<\/strong>.\u00a0 Most products and services on the market contain more features than customers really want.\u00a0 In other words, companies are over-delivering.\u00a0 This is wasteful.\u00a0 By understanding what features of your products and services that customers want to consume, you can trim out the extra features (and the operations activities that produce them) \u2013 saving you money and still giving the customer what they value.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>Remember the target is moving.<\/strong>\u00a0 Meeting customer needs is a moving target and to hit it, you need to know how fast the target is moving so you can aim for where it is going to be (at the time of the sale transaction).\u00a0 In your operational excellence initiatives, you have the opportunity to either increase your accuracy of prediction (to be able to aim farther in the future) or increase your agility (to respond to changes more quickly).\u00a0 Both approaches can be effective, but you need to be clear on which you are trying to achieve.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">By focusing on the customer and understanding what they value, you will be able to identify operational excellence initiatives that help your company become not only more profitable, but more competitive.\u00a0 For over 60 years, the experts at Kepner-Tregoe have been helping companies achieve their operational excellence ambitions by taking tried-and-true problem solving and decision-making methods and applying them to the unique industry and customer dynamics that companies face.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Operational Excellence isn\u2019t just about profitability and making money for the company.\u00a0 At the end of the day, the reason your company exists is to create the products and services that customers need and value at a price they are willing to pay.\u00a0 Yes, profitability is important \u2013 it is what encourages you to stay [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":834,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"ppma_author":[],"class_list":["post-25435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-other"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v27.7 (Yoast SEO v27.7) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-premium-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>5 Things you can do to make your OE efforts more customer centric - Kepner-Tregoe<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Operational Excellence isn\u2019t just about profitability. 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