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
1
Invest in New Features or Improve Existing Ones?
投资新功能还是改进现有功能？
（续上期）
Some new features were no-brainers, such as helping our customers better manage the administrative paperwork linked to any car purchase.
有些新功能是比较简单的，比如帮助客户更好地管理与购车相关的行政文书。
Yet this bureaucratic problem was challenged by our rapid growth and meant adding a new process dealing with the multitude of documents to our operations.
然而，随着我们业务的快速增长，这些工作给我们带来了一些挑战，意味着我们需要在运营中增加一个新的流程来处理大量文件。
We tackled this by decoupling the work from existing processes and linking these actions tightly to the sales process — customers needed to do this after the sale and before they drove away.
我们通过将这项工作与现有流程分离，并将这些操作紧密连接到销售流程中来解决这个问题——客户需要在销售完成后并在开车离开前完成这些手续。
Ultimately, we added a helpful feature, which added costs but relatively little added complexity.
最终，我们增加了一项有用的功能，虽然增加了成本，但对复杂性的增加却相对较小。
Other features, however, had more significant complexity impacts.
然而，其他功能更具复杂性。
Offering a financing option, for instance, was an attractive idea because many customers expected it, and providing the service looked profitable.
比如，提供融资选项是一个有吸引力的想法，因为许多客户期望得到这项服务，而且看起来可以带来利润。
But we were not financiers and had to bring in a finance partner with all their processes and old economy reflexes. However, doing so slowed us considerably and complicated our homegrown systems
in ways we could hardly anticipate.
但我们并不是金融机构，不得不引入一个金融合作伙伴，而他们的流程和旧经济思维让我们步伐减缓，并且让我们难以预料地把我们自有系统变得更加复杂。
We then launched our most challenging new feature: offering refurbished secondhand cars on the site.
随后，我们推出了最具挑战性的新功能：在网站上提供翻新二手车的服务。
Our idea was to eliminate the pain of not trusting a secondhand car you buy from a dealership (consider a “used-car salesman” image in your mind for a second).
我们的想法是让客户消除从经销商处购买二手车时的不信任感（想象一下“二手车推销员”的形象）。
We decided to create a state-of-the-art refurbishment factory to benefit from the scale of this work that the site traffic would bring to the plant.
为此，我们决定建立一个最先进的翻新工厂，以利用从网站流量带来的业务规模。
This new service feature required a whole new value stream for the company.
这一新服务功能需要一个全新的价值流。
It had different economics, a different quality culture (“good as new” vs. new), an industrial site (we had no notion about how a plant worked), and a whole new logistics setup to move vehicles to and
from the plant.
它有着不同的经济模式、不同的质量文化（“焕然如新” vs. 新车）、一个工业场地（我们对工厂如何运作毫无概念），并且需要全新的物流体系来将车辆运送进出工厂。
That decision impacted every internal system in the business. Still, it turned out to be the right move, though we didn’t just do it for growth reasons.
这个决策影响了公司内部的每一个系统。然而，事实证明这是一个正确的举措，尽管我们并不是仅仅为了增长而这么做的。
Indeed, back in the day, we saw that exploring and developing a more circular economy made sense — simply because there were far more used cars on the market than new ones.
事实上，在那个时候，我们认为探索和开发更可循环经济模式是有意义的——因为市场上的二手车数量远远超过新车。
But as you can imagine, adding used vehicles turned out to be quite a headache.
但正如你所想象的那样，增加二手车的业务也确实带来了不少麻烦。
2
Delivering on Ambitious Promises Adds Complexity
履行雄心勃勃的配送承诺增加了复杂性
And then we eventually ran into a bridge too far.
我们最终遇到了一个超出我们能力范围的挑战。
One day, flush with our growth and following a successful finance round, we brainstormed delivering cars directly to customers’ front doors rather than our existing system of customers picking up their
purchase at the point of sale.
有一天，在公司增长顺利并成功完成一轮融资后，我们集思广益，想出一个想法：将汽车直接配送到客户家门口，而不是让客户到销售点取车。
We wanted to be the Amazon of cars. As it turned out, an idea born of a dinner with other startup leaders appealed to fewer real-life customers than we imagined.
我们想成为汽车界的“亚马逊”。然而，这个诞生于与其他初创公司领导人晚餐的想法，并非如我们想象的那样能够吸引更多的客户。
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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