SEVEN STEPS TO X-ENGINEERING SUCCESS

Jim Champy says the path to profits is paved with process.

1. Continuously gather and digest essential information about your customers.
Develop the disciplines and processes needed to truly understand customer pull. Get to know customers’ realities, situations, behaviors, expectations and values.

2. Segment customers, but not too quickly.
Segmentation is not an exact science. While companies are building authentic, unique knowledge about individual customers, they should expect to provide all customers with an equal level of service. Later, customers can be segmented by their expectations and values—not by their size, buying power or profitability. The X-engineering goal is eventually to market to a single customer segment.

3. Determine the compelling proposition for each customer or customer set.
Distinctiveness could come from a single proposition or from a combination: the best price, the fastest delivery or development time, the best quality, the greatest choice or the most innovative or the best integration of products and services in the industry. Once a business knows its customers’ needs, expectations and values, management can find compelling propositions.

4. Walk before you run.
Some companies try too hard to develop finished or sophisticated product offerings, which can lead to problems. The company may not be able to execute the offering or the customer may not understand the complex proposition. Start with a simple proposition, get market traction and then build on it.

5. Look for partners that will help.
Companies should begin to consider with whom to work in delivering a proposition. How might the proposition be enhanced by relationships with other companies? What form should these relationships take?

6. Focus on process redesign.
Find a way to design processes with partners to deliver the most compelling customer proposition. Always search for harmonization opportunities.

7. Constantly measure your performance through the eyes of the customer.
When businesses are doing well, they should be the most concerned about what comes next. One way is to constantly ask customers whether a process push is meeting their pull. If companies can’t differentiate what they sell or how they sell it, they will be forced to differentiate by how much they sell it for—and that means selling at commodity prices.