The nature of people in our business is the desire to fix things. This has been one of the pleasures of working in the construction industry; working with men and women that see something that’s not functioning and collaborating together to make it work better. One of the major challenges is to have our solution be more cost effective and valuable to the customer. Ultimately, we all have to satisfy our customers which means we must have a fundamental interpretation of what “fixed” is. In the LEAN world, it means we must seek to add value when we add steps in a process, or rearrange them.
For the last 24 years at Jenco we have been inventing solutions for every conceivable problem an electrical contractor encounters. What I am now beginning to realize is many of these functioning solutions add no value to our products and services from our customer’s perspective. One example is having too many specialists working at Jenco. We have fallen prey to the notion that if you do just one thing, you can do it well. What is not often thought about, however, is that if you only do one thing well, you must have a lot of that one thing to do or you will have excess capacity that no customer should have to pay for.
In order to take a fresh look at the value our job descriptions and our processes have to our customers, we have reorganized Jenco into customer facing teams. Each team is led by a Jenco stockholder and has an account manager. The account manager is not a specialist, rather a generalist in that they take care of all the needs our customers have. This starts at pre-construction services and continues all the way through warranty close-out.
We have already begun to receive comments from our customers that we are becoming more responsive to their needs. Interested in learning more about how we plan on helping you in 2014? Call me (480-513-1611) or shoot me an email.
Kelly Anderson