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·伯乐和尼古拉斯·查蒂耶
An entrepreneur shares why and how lean management helps startups innovate and grow.
一位企业家分享了精益管理为何以及如何帮助初创企业进行创新和增长。
Are we doing the right thing?
我们在做正确的事情吗？
And are we doing it right?
我们做得正确吗？
Those are the two main dimensions of thinking about quality, and neither has simple answers.
这两个问题是思考质量的两个主要维度，而这两个问题都没有简单的答案。
One of us (Nicolas) and his cofounder Guillaume started Aramis Auto with a clear idea of making car purchasing a pleasurable experience.
我们中的一位（Nicolas）和他的联合创始人Guillaume怀着让购车成为一种愉悦体验的明确理念创立了Aramis 汽车。
So, we looked at the main pain points in the purchasing process from the customer’s point of view and thought about how to use nascent digital technologies to mitigate them.
因此，我们从客户的角度出发，审视了购买过程中的主要痛点，并思考如何利用新兴的数字技术来减轻这些痛点。
At the time, Amazon was still a bookseller, and digital technology was a great unknown.
当时，亚马逊还只是一家书店，数字技术还是一个未知领域。
We sought to transform a traditionally mistrustful and poor customer experience into a convenient and pleasing one.
我们致力于将传统上令人不信任且糟糕的客户体验转变为一种方便且令人愉快的体验。
And so we displayed a fixed price for our automobile offer on the website, with no possible further negotiation.
因此，我们在网站上标出了汽车的固定价格，并标明没有进一步议价的可能。
Furthermore, to eliminate the hassle of going from brand dealership to brand dealership to find your car, we presented a full lineup of all vehicles on our website.
此外，为了消除客户在各品牌经销商之间奔波寻找汽车而产生的各种的麻烦，我们在网站上展示了所有车辆的完整列表。
This online listing allowed people to browse and choose the car they liked most, regardless of the brand or the new ones the dealerships were pushing.
这种在线展示使人们能够随意浏览并选择他们最喜欢的汽车，而不受品牌或经销商推荐的新车型的限制。
What we wanted to do was clear. Then we had to do it right.
我们想做的事情非常明确，接下来我们必须把它做好。
In our early days, creating a working site to display cars, setting up the logistics of purchasing the automobile from manufacturers or wholesalers, and then delivering it to customers was a mad scramble.
在我们创业初期，搭建一个展示汽车的工作网站，安排从制造商或批发商那里购买汽车的物流，然后将其交付给客户，这是一项非常繁杂和极具挑战的工作。
So, we tried things until they kinda worked. And we learned the hard way that displaying a large selection of cars on the site meant customers rarely selected one nearby.
因此，我们不断尝试各种方法，直到能够把所有流程跑通。我们经历了惨痛的教训后了解到，我们在网站上展示大量的汽车选择意味着客户很少选择离他们较近的车辆。
That meant we had to figure out the logistics of moving them across the country without costing us an arm and a leg and eating up all the already razor-thin margin.
这意味着我们不得不想办法将车辆跨国运送，既不能让运输成本过高，也不能吞噬本来就已经微薄的利润。
Unfortunately, the existing off-the-shelf solutions didn’t work for us.
不幸的是，现有的现成解决方案并不适合我们。
We had to develop custom internal systems, which had a few quirks and eventual legacy issues. But at least we understood how they worked — and when they didn’t, why.
我们只好开发定制的内部系统，虽然这些系统有一些奇怪的小问题和最终的遗留问题，但至少我们明白它们是如何运作的——而且当它们无法正常工作时，我们也知道原因。
1
Invest in New Features or Improve Existing Ones?
投资新功能还是改进现有功能？
As a startup, we faced the life-or-death issue of client acquisition: to reach a critical mass of stable business.
作为一家初创公司，我们面临着一个生死攸关的问题 – 即获取客户：达到稳定的业务。
Few customers buy additional cars quickly, so we needed to boost revenue through ancillary routes.
由于很少有客户会在短时间内再次购买汽车，因此我们需要通过其他途径来增加收入。
To achieve this, we sought to convince customers to try our service and to build a reputation for reliability and friendliness.
为了实现这一目标，我们努力说服客户尝试我们的服务，并建立可靠且友好的声誉。
In our rush to acquire new customers, we soon hit a fundamental issue of innovation: innovation (offering something new) yields nothing if it’s not adopted (taken up by the market).
在我们急于获取新客户的过程中，很快就遇到了一个根本性的创新问题：如果创新（提供新东西）没有被市场接受（被市场采纳），那么它就毫无价值。
So we had to decide where to invest our meager funds to grab new customers’ interests — in either new features or maintaining and correcting the few we had to do exceptionally well.
因此，我们必须做出将有限的资金投入到哪里的决策，以吸引新客户的兴趣——是投资于新功能，还是维护和完善我们现有的功能以做到极致。
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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