The Value of Working End to End

Eliminate barriers by establishing and enabling effective communication across suppliers, customers, and stakeholders, as appropriate.

Practitioners: strategic

The focus on this concept is strategic in nature. When I first read this concept, I thought in terms of the highest-level value stream. From end to end – supplier, organization, customer. Where does value start? How does value flow? What does value mean to the end user of our product or service? How do they create value for their customers?

This leads me to the need for creating alignment and agreement across the value stream. If we have differences of opinion, we may be creating inefficiencies and suboptimized performance not based on anything but a lack of information.

In one of my executive roles, my team and I discovered that our suppliers did not understand how to read our mechanical prints. We first recognized the symptoms, inability to deliver quality, inability to deliver on time, inability to meet costs. When we began to inquire about the cause we discovered the root cause – the complexity of our prints and their lack of understanding our engineering language.

Our solution was education. Our suppliers did not intend to perform poorly. We had not taken the responsibility of ensuring their success. Where else might we be missing opportunities or misunderstanding the symptoms we are experiencing across the value stream? As a Sponsor, it is our responsibility to investigate and resolve these hidden problems.

End to End

Taking this same mindset into the customer relationship may also surface mutually beneficial opportunities. Is there anything more we can offer our customers to enhance the value of their offer to their customers. There may be additional tasks that our organization could much more easily conduct to help our customers increase their value and increase our value to them. If we are not talking about this with them, we will never uncover these opportunities.

There is always additional value to be found. When will we learn to seek it out? When will we change our perspective to outward facing value rather than just inward facing protection? The stronger our relationship grow across our value streams the move value we all create.