Historically Lean was developed to optimize manufacturing processes. This makes perfect sense since at that time industrial operations were growing very rapidly. But then service operations started growing too and their share of global jobs had become more and more important. Do you know how big is the share of service jobs today? We calculated that the service jobs now represents more than 50% of the global workforce. So this means that the limiting link to manufacturing would cover only half of the opportunities and forgetting the other half of operations. In fact, World Bank data shows the global shift of jobs to service as economies mature. So far, the share of agriculture has been decreasing the fastest as part of the total GDP. But, the share of industry jobs is declining as well, as the share of services increase over time. Furthermore if we zoom into developed economies, services represent about 80% of employment. Service jobs are found in service sectors, such as IT or finance, but also in support functions of both services and good manufacturing companies. In that case, these are so-called internal services, such as human resources, finance, IT, legal but also marketing, sales and after sales. Just like Lean can be applied into manufacturing to improve production processes, Lean can be applied to these internal processes to optimize them. In order to apply the Lean approach to internal services we should ask ourself a fundamental question. Who are the customers who benefit from internal services? The common shortcut would be to consider the company's employees as internal customers and to build all continuous improvement path around them. So, for example, the internal customers of the HR department are the employees. Internal customers of the finance department are managers. This method has the advantage of encouraging high internal responsiveness but it also prevents thinking of the actual end customer. In reality, internal customers are no real customers because they do not really pay for the service they get. Even if the company's departments buy and charge services from each other internally, this is still not a real marketplace. Department budgets are no real money. Not in the sense that these transactions are fake, but in the sense that the employees do not value that money as customers typically value their own money. The best way to think about it is to consider that every employees in a company should create value for the end customer. But not always in the same way. We can simplify this by defining the three categories of employees with respect to value creation. First, employees involved in the value chain who created the value directory. Second, employees in support function who enable value creation. In this case, customers are willing to pay whenever these employees ensure a quality of the value customers pay for. For example, customers are willing to pay for a finance rebirth as long as that specific finance rebirth allows employees to make a better and faster decision to better served customers. In some cases, we were able to reduce the number of our finance reports by more than 50% because many of them didn't create value for the end customer. The third category is employees in the sales and marketing functions who have to match offer and demand of value. These employees create value when they properly understand customer needs, make the customer aware about the value, that can satisfy their needs and fix the price. In services you should never forget the end customers and always ask yourself, if customer knew that they are paying for what I'm doing right now, would they be willing to pay?
