在快速增长期间，精益如何帮助企业管理满足客户的成本和复杂性？
By Michael Ballé and Nicolas Chartier
迈克尔·巴莱和尼古拉斯·查蒂耶
2
Delivering on Ambitious Promises Adds Complexity
履行雄心勃勃的配送承诺增加了复杂性
（续上期）
Home delivery has been a thorn in our side for a long time until the past couple of years when lean techniques of kanban and kaizen helped us turn it around and finally make it a success.
送车到家服务一直是我们的难题，直到最近几年，我们通过看板和改善等精益技术扭转了局面，最终使这项服务取得了成功。
There is a natural process at work here. Businesses seek to build growth by offering new features, thinking each one will convince a further marginal customer, a customer on the cusp of
trying the service that needs an extra push to go for it.
这里有一个自然的过程在起作用。企业为了增长而提供新功能，认为每一个新功能都会吸引更多潜在客户—— 而一个客户在主动尝试某种服务之前，需要一点额外的主动推荐、讲解来推动。
However, new features need a new delivery process, which burdens the company with additional work, and many of these processes add complexity to existing systems.
然而，新功能需要新的交付流程，这会给公司带来了额外的工作量，而这些流程会增加现有系统的复杂性。
As you go, of course, the temptation is to seek synergies by using legacy systems to deliver these new features, which is always tricky, or, at some point, if you’ve set up a new process, to
revamp existing systems to integrate it all somehow.
随着时间的推移，企业往往会寻求使用现有系统来实现这些新功能的方法，这总是很棘手，或者在某些时候，如果你已经设立了新的流程，你会改造现有系统将所有流程整合起来。
As an entrepreneur, there’s a part of the problem you understand quite well: how much to invest in new features and then how much to invest in maintenance to make the whole thing work.
作为一名企业家，对一部分问题有着深刻的理解：究竟应该投资多少新功能，以及应该投入多少资金进行系统维护以确保整体运转顺利。
Entrepreneurs know that, as they add new features, they increase complexity exponentially, which makes maintenance increasingly difficult.
企业家们清楚地知道，随着新功能的增加，系统的复杂性会呈指数增长，这使得维护变得越来越困难。
That means we must also justify maintenance budgets to investors (and society at large) who tend to view money spent on innovation as an investment but money spent on maintenance
activities as an expense to cut.
这意味着我们还必须向投资者（以及社会）证明维护预算的合理性——他们往往将创新投入视为投资，而将维护费用视为应该削减的开支。
Also, managing complexity is very frustrating for entrepreneurs because they don’t know how to handle the issue.
此外，管理复杂性对企业家来说非常令人沮丧，因为他们往往不知道如何应对这一问题。
They experience the challenges as a constant stream of problems, fights for resources, loud arguments, and pressure on teams.
他们会经历不断出现的问题、资源争夺、激烈的争论以及团队压力。
The fun startup entrepreneurs wanted to create becomes a typical company with stories of burnout, where nothing works, people are discouraged, and so on. Same old, same old.
曾经充满乐趣的创业公司渐渐变成了一个典型的企业，员工精疲力尽，系统无法正常运转，大家士气低落，诸如此类的情况不断发生。老调重弹。
Furthermore, as an entrepreneur, the temptation to blow it up and put in a completely new system is always there.
同时，作为企业家，抛弃旧系统并引入全新系统的诱惑始终存在。
3
How Kanban and Kaizen Resolved Big Problems through Small Improvements
如何通过看板及改善这些小改善来解决大问题
And this is where lean turned things around for us. Defining every job, as our sensei taught us, as “work plus kaizen” made a radical difference because now we had a sensible way to
handle maintenance activities.
这就是精益管理为我们扭转局面的关键所在。正如老师教导的那样，将每一项工作定义为“工作加改善”带来了根本性的变化，因为现在我们有了合理的方法来处理维护活动。
By pursuing kaizen ideas, teams themselves were resolving maintenance issues.
通过推动改善想法，团队自己解决了维护问题。
On some simple issues, such as the paperwork process, the teams radically improved things to the point that we realized the slowest part of the process was the postal services.
在一些简单问题上，比如文书处理流程，团队进行了彻底的改善，这样我们意识到流程中最慢的部分竟然是邮政服务。
So they identified a better way to circulate documents from and to customers and with government agencies (we also did a lot of lobbying to help them digitalize their processes).
因此，他们找到了一个更好的方式来处理与客户和政府机构之间的文件传递（我们还进行了大量说服工作，帮助他们将处理流程数字化）。
Having all teams participate in kaizen helped in two ways: identifying and implementing actual improvements and getting a clearer understanding of the systems issues.
让所有团队参与改善带来了两个方面的好处：一是识别并实施了实际的改善，二是更清晰地理解了系统问题。
Additionally, team kaizen increased team member engagement because they could finally do something themselves about their frustrations with “the system.”
此外，团队改善活动还提高了团队成员的参与度，因为他们终于可以亲自处理自己对“系统”的不满了。
Setting up various kanban systems had the same incredible clarifying effect, especially for two processes.
建立各种看板系统也带来了同样令人惊叹的清晰易懂的效果，尤其是在两个流程中。
First, in the refurbishment factory, a kanban system helped us double production without any significant investment.
首先，在翻新工厂中，使用看板系统帮助我们在没有重大投资的情况下将产量翻倍。
Second, and more importantly, the pull flow maintained by the kanban system from the sales points to the factory led us to see logistics as a critical point to success, not an additional
drag (which was massively helpful to understand operations in other countries with acquisitions).
其次，更重要的是，通过看板系统从销售点到工厂维持的拉动式流程使我们认识到物流是成功的关键点，而不是额外的负担（这对理解其他国家收购中的运营至关重要）。
With this realization, we radically improved our logistics, kaizen by kaizen.
有了这样的意识，通过逐步改善，大幅提升了物流效率。
Armed with kanban and kaizen, we could involve our people in improving their own operations, including doing maintenance tasks and highlighting where investment was needed.
借助看板和改善，能够让员工参与到自己作业的改善中，包括执行维护任务并指出需要投资的地方。
But for us, as entrepreneurs, this cracked open one of our most confounding problems.
对于我们这些企业家来说，这破解了最令人困惑的问题之一。
The story people rarely tell you about innovation is the struggle to make it work and to get it adopted.
关于创新，人们很少讲述的故事是如何让它成功运作并被广泛采用的艰辛过程。
People also often present using lean practices as a way to optimize existing processes — which we find silly because it assumes prevailing ways of working while adding to the complexity
challenge.
人们也常常将精益实践视为优化现有流程的一种方式——我们认为这很荒谬，因为它假定了现行的工作方式，同时增加了复杂性挑战。
Instead, we discovered that lean management is a brilliant way of engaging every mind in the company, enabling the move from innovation to adoption.
相反，我们发现精益管理是一种绝妙的方法，可以让公司中的每个人都参与进来，从而实现从创新到应用的转变。
And also, astonishingly, that lean thinking and practices work even with harebrained ideas such as our home delivery one.
而且令人惊讶的是，即使是像我们送车到家这样看似异想天开的想法，精益思维和实践也能奏效。
When the teams focus on what customers are like and want and start going at it through kaizen rather than reinvention, magical things happen.
当团队专注于客户的需求和期望，并通过改善而非彻底重塑来解决问题时，奇迹就会发生。
Innovation requires new features, yes. New features add complexity to internal systems, yes. And the secret to managing this impossible equation is understanding the power of kanban,
kaizen, and the support of teamwork.
创新确实需要新功能，新功能也确实会增加内部系统的复杂性。管理这一难题的秘诀在于理解看板、改善以及团队合作的力量。
Yet, to fully grasp the power of kaizen, one needs to learn to see it strategically, wall to wall, instead of tactically, for process improvement.
然而，要充分理解改善的力量，必须学会从战略层面而不是战术层面去看待它，而不仅仅是为了流程改进。
The secret to handling innovation and growth together is no secret: put customers first, go to the gemba to get people to agree on the real problems, and encourage kaizen, both within
and across teams. Then raise the bar.
处理创新与增长的秘诀并不神秘：以客户为先，现场观察，让人们在真正的问题上达成一致，并在团队内部和跨团队间鼓励改善。然后，不断提高目标。
原文链接：
https://www.lean.org/the-lean-post/How Can Lean Help Manage the Costs and Complications of Satisfying Customers During Rapid Growth? - Lean Enterprise Institute
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