Interview with Jim Womack part 5 of 5 has been posted by the Lean manufacturing blog. Each part provide valuable insights, from part 4:
Toyota has recently said that it will now make a major effort to apply process thinking to dealer networks, probably beginning in Europe, and all of us who buy cars should wish them every success. We are making a major effort in this book to show how a totally different system of sales and service would work and we hope that a few dealers and then a lot will drink the Cool-aid.
from part 3:
Why should Dell (and Microsoft and…) just quit wasting the time of their premiums customers? If they could get their brains in gear, they could quit wasting the time of all their customers and save themselves a lot of money in the process. (But they would have to treat each customer problem as a kaizen opportunity, rather than just a nuisance to be disposed off at as low a cost as possible with an out-sourced, off-shored help line.)
Great stuff.
