What has changed?

What has happened in business is a change from the individual entrepreneur to a manufacturing environment where the customer is not seen by the crafts person. The distance between the person manufacturing the product and the customer gives the appearance the customer is not important. Some companies don’t even bring the explicit customer requirements down to the manufacturing floor for the operators to see.

Yet, all management decisions about manufacture and distribution center around the customer. Without the customer there would be no sale. There would be no revenue flow. There would be no business.

What has happened is the communication from customer to the person actually producing the product has become more difficult for business building for the consumer market.

Ford is given credit for the introduction of mass production techniques into the auto industry, transforming manufacturing for ever into a process aimed to provide product to the consumer market place. They say that Ford’s mass production ignored the customer. That is not exactly true.

Ford’s mass production met the requirements of the customer in the only way known at the time to build high volumes of product. Hand crafted products did not meet the requirement of supplying product to the mass market. The customer was not lost from the business. The customer was made invisible to the person on the production line.

The invisible customer is one aspect of modern manufacturing the lean environment is trying to rectify.