As I’m researching Quicken Loans for potential business opportunities I came across a list of “Isms” and one resonated with me a bit. “A Penny Saved is a Penny.” This seems counter-intuitive since we’ve all heard “a penny saved is a penny earned” but I think in the context of rapid growth and innovation this revised version makes a lot more sense (cents?). And certainly in the context of Continuous Improvement I seem to have spent a great deal of time not on great ideas, but rather making sure all those great ideas are moving us forward, not keeping us motionless, or worse yet, moving backwards or at cross-purposes.

My favorite “aha” came from a deposits fulfillment process where we were considering how to speed up decisions for customers. Our process subject matter experts came up with an idea to speed up processing by a few minutes, and we put that on the “board” for consideration. Seems like a great little project, it will reduce handle time and fulfillment time while making a task less tedious, so a seemingly win-win-win for shareholders, customers, and associates!

But we also began to look at the process more end-to-end, and using that new lens we realized this project was just a penny. Because there’s little point in speeding up fulfillment for the customer by a few minutes, but when you look past the fulfillment processing step you found that fulfilled packages sit in an outgoing mail cart for an entire day! So we would save a few minutes so that a completed package could sit in an outgoing mail bin for an extra two minutes? That’s not even a penny!

How did we go wrong? Our fundamental assumption that once a package was processed, the customer “felt” that the task was completed. But in reality, the customer didn’t know their request was fulfilled until they received their package in Snail Mail. Our measure of completed cycle time was driven from internal system metrics, but your customer uses a different yardstick. You’ll do well to align your yardstick to the one the customer uses, because that’s the one he/she uses when reviewing your product or considering competitors!