The “Course Topics” series from Manage Train Learn and Slide Topics is a collection of over 4000 slides that will help you master a wide range of management and personal development skills. The 202 PowerPoints in this series offer you a complete and in-depth study of each topic. This presentation is on "From Ichiban to Kaizen".

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Ichiban to Kaizen
Customer Care
MTL Course Topics
Ichiban to Kaizen
CUSTOMER CARE

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Ichiban to Kaizen
Customer Care
MTL Course Topics
The Course Topics series from Manage Train Learn is a large collection of topics that will help you as a learner
to quickly and easily master a range of skills in your everyday working life and life outside work. If you are a
trainer, they are perfect for adding to your classroom courses and online learning plans.
COURSE TOPICS FROM MTL
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Customer Care
MTL Course Topics
ARE YOU READY?
OK, LET’S START!

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Customer Care
MTL Course Topics
INTRODUCTION
The phenomenal success of Japanese manufacturing
industry in the last quarter of the 20th century can be put
down to that country's post-war determination to adopt a
strategy of quality, reliability and customer care. Using
concepts such as Ichiban and Kaizen, Japanese industry has
overtaken the West in its pre-eminence as suppliers of
goods and services. Having ignored many of the managerial
assumptions upon which Japan has built her success,
organisations in the West are now beginning to re-discover
them.

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Ichiban to Kaizen
Customer Care
MTL Course Topics
FROM ICHIBAN TO KAIZEN
There are seven strategies that take us from the concept of
Ichiban to the concept of Kaizen in our search for customer
care.
These are...
1. Ichiban: the desire to be the best
2. seeing the organisation as a customer-serving entity
3. encouraging everyone in the organisation to focus on
their own customers
4. designing products and services around quality
5. investing in your own people to deliver excellent
customer care
6. developing systems that are flexible and fleet-of-foot
7. Kaizen: continuous and never-ending improvement of
products, services, systems and people.

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Customer Care
MTL Course Topics
ICHIBAN
Ichiban is a Japanese word which has no equivalent word in
English. It means "a desire to be the best". Customer-driven
organisations exhibit it throughout their ranks.
We want to be the best in our area.
We want to be the best in our region.
We want to be the best in our sector.
We want to be the best in our division.
We want to be the best in our market.
The new twist that Ichiban brings to strategic thinking is that
being the best can be achieved not by ruthless cut-price
aggressive attitudes towards competitors but by long-term,
strategic and persistent attention to customers.

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Customer Care
MTL Course Topics
BENCHMARKING
There are two aspects to producing a product that the
customer will be happy with: delivering what they want and
doing so in a cost-effective way.
Benchmarking means comparing the way you work to the
"benchmarks" set by the very best of others. These could be
other departments, other projects, other colleagues, or
your competitors - anyone who performs at the current
best.
You can benchmark how well you produce your project, to
what your efficiency ratios are, to your absentee rates, your
use of resources, or whatever.
Benchmarking is a method used in quality-conscious
Japanese companies and is reflected in this quote of Sun Tzu
in the "Art of War": "If you know your enemy and know
yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles."

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BEST PRACTICE
When car makers Ford compared their North American
accounts payable function with best practice elsewhere they
found that while they employed 500 staff, their Japanese
rivals Mazda employed just 5.
Mazda did the same job but in a different way, using invoice-
less processing; payment on receipt of goods, not on receipt
of invoices; reduction in the maximum of items to three;
and the use of an on-line database.
Adapting these methods, Ford achieved a 75% reduction in
headcount and improved material and financial control.

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THE 10 COMMANDMENTS
The reason why many Japanese companies outstripped
Western products and goods in the last decades of the 20th
century was their dedication to customer quality.
In their book "The Golden Rules of Customer Care", Carl
Sewell and Paul Brown offer the following Ten
Commandments of Customer Service:
1. Bring 'em back alive
2. Systems, not just smiles
3. Underpromise, overdeliver
4. When the customer asks, the answer is always "Yes"
5. Fire your QC and PR departments
6. No complaints? Something's wrong!
7. Measure everything
8. Salaries are unfair, pay by results
9. Your Mum was right. Show others respect.
10. Japanese 'em (with quality).

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MTL Course Topics
SERVING THE CUSTOMER
Many of the industries that have declined and disappeared
in the Western world did so for one simple reason: they
took their eye off the ball. Instead of focusing on meeting
their customers' needs, they complacently settled for
meeting their own.
Kenichi Ohmae, one of the breed of Japanese management
thinkers who have fuelled that countries post-war growth,
regards customer-based strategies as the only ones that will
lead to long-term organisational success.
Simply put, the organisation is, and always will be, a
customer-serving entity.
"The customer (wherever he or she is in the world) is
equidistant from the corporate centre." (Kenichi Ohmae)

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THE GLUE THAT BINDS
In the view of many traditional organisations, power
increases as you move up the hierarchy. It is concentrated at
the very top.
In customer-focused organisations, it works the other way
round. Power is concentrated in the direction of those who
are closest to the customer.
Organisations that have a clear strategy of customer service
see customer care as the glue that binds everyone together,
whether at the top, in the background or at the coal-face.
"No matter what strategy leaders inside the organisation
devise, what customers see is at the front line." (Rosabeth
Moss Kanter)

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QUALITY RULES
When customers expect a "quality" product or service, they
expect one that will satisfy their needs.
Different management writers define "quality" in different
ways...
1. Joseph Juran defines "quality" as "fitness for purpose or
use";
2. W Edwards Deming defines "quality" as "meeting the
needs of the customer, present and future."
3. Philip Crosby defines "quality" as "conformance to
requirements"
4. Armand Feigenbaum defines "quality" as "the total
composite product and service characteristics of
marketing, engineering, manufacture and maintenance
through which the product and service in use will meet
the expectation by the customer."

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DELIVERING SERVICE
The Japanese used to take two weeks to deliver a car. In the
West, it took eight weeks.
Quality-oriented Japanese companies take the view that...
1. the customer wants and expects quality and is
disappointed if they don't get it;
2. a quality product has no defects, is reliable and fulfils its
promise;
3. the delivery of a quality product or service comes about
when everyone in the organisation is customer-focused;
4. the management style of a quality-driven organisation
has significantly different beliefs about work and
workers than a profit-driven one;
5. perfect quality is an ideal that can never be fully
attained, but is still worth striving for.

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CORRECTING QUALITY
The corrective approach to managing quality is to rely on
picking up any problems in quality before the product or
service reaches the customer. This is the traditional way in
which businesses have approached quality.
It means...
1. inspecting the product at certain critical points for
defects
2. employing quality control inspectors
3. sampling the product as it is being produced
4. using statistical devices to allow through product that is
satisfactory and reject product that is unsatisfactory
5. finding someone to blame when the product is not up
to scratch.
The corrective approach to managing quality aims to keep
costs down. Typically corrective quality, including the costs
of the occasional poor product getting through costs
between 2 and 10% of turnover.

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PREVENTING DEFECTS
The corrective approach to managing quality is
fundamentally flawed: it betrays a mind-set that accepts the
inevitability of poor quality.
Preventative approaches to managing quality take an
opposite standpoint: to eliminate all defects or sub-standard
quality altogether.
The preventative approach to quality has the following
features...
1. it is a total approach, dealing not with just the technical
production of a product or service, but with every
aspect of the business
2. it demands the best: the best tools, the best people, the
best materials
3. it has an obsession about detail
4. it is a continuous process in which absolute quality
while never fully attainable, is continually sought.
Preventative approaches to quality typically cost at around
the 3% level; long-term benefits are incalculable.

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RIGHT FIRST TIME
There are no prizes for coming in second where quality is
concerned; you need to produce results which are right first
time.
Product or service needs to be delivered...
• at the right time
• at the right cost
• in the right way
• according to the right system
• at the right location
• with the right specification
• following the right method.
Getting it right means working with suppliers to get the right
materials, tools and equipment; with customers to ensure
you understand what is "right" for them; with designers to
design the right way to make it and with the team to work in
the right way together.

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ORIENTATED TO PEOPLE
People are the key factor in the complex equation that
makes a customer-driven organisation.
Technology is not enough; management is not enough. Only
by maximising the potential power of all the people who
work in the organisation can quality products and services
be consistently and reliably delivered.
"Business, we know, is now so complex and difficult, the
survival of firms so hazardous in an environment
increasingly competitive and fraught with danger that their
continued existence depends on the day-to-day mobilization
of every ounce of intelligence...Only by drawing on the
combined brainpower of all its employees can a firm face up
to the turbulence and constraints of today's environment."
(Konosuke Matsushita)
The only natural resource that the second biggest industrial
country in the world, Japan, possesses is its people.

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FLEET OF FOOT
Serving the customer and their changing needs and
expectations means travelling light. Organisations that grow
too big and slow, like dinosaurs, lose the fleetness of foot to
adapt and change and so are brought down by those who
are quicker to see and seize the opportunities.
The strategies of customer -focused organisations aim to
make themselves adaptable; competitive; responsive;
innovative; and light-footed.
In the words of Professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter, customer-
driven firms are like giants who have learned how to dance.

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R.I.P
.
The once-dominant British motorbike industry is no more.
The decline of the industry with once-proud names like
Norton, BSA and Triumph, was characterised by
complacency, self-satisfaction, arrogance and a belief that
because they were the best they could stay the best. Its
leaders aspired to maintaining the status quo; they saw no
reason to make better motorbikes than they already made.
By contrast, the Japanese motorbike firms of Yamaha and
Honda set themselves targets to be the best in the world.
Through early failures, but continuous and ceaseless
learning, they were able to respond to customer needs. In
one 18-month period, Honda produced 81 new models.
In the early 21st century, Honda became the 6th largest car
company in the world with sales of 120 billion dollars a year.

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Customer Care
MTL Course Topics
KAIZEN
Kaizen, like Ichiban, is a Japanese word that defies exact
interpretation into an English word. It is best defined as a
process of continuous improvement.
Continuous improvement means...
1. having a clear vision of where you want to be, even if it
takes years to get there
2. a willingness to make mistakes and learn from them
3. an obsession with learning
4. using the abilities of everyone in the organisation to
think about how the business can improve its service to
the customers.
In making the Civic car, Soichiro Honda undertook extensive
global research ranging across everything from driving
habits in each potential market country to road conditions
throughout the year.

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PLANTING A GARDEN
The process of Kaizen - "continuous improvement" - has
been likened to the planting of a garden...
1. it can't happen overnight. It needs patience, constant
attention and love for the end result
2. only by continual trying and learning about what works
and what doesn't work can you improve
3. you need to become an expert about the things that
matter: the conditions for growth, the most favourable
climate, the best materials, the best tools, the best
methods...
4. you need those who work for you to be skilled at
working in the most efficient and effective way
5. there are times when you need to intervene in the
process and times when you need to stand back and
leave well alone.

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THAT’S
IT!
WELL DONE!

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THANK YOU
This has been a Slide Topic from Manage Train Learn