Measuring Business Excellence

Purpose - The purpose of the paper is to develop existing tools or methodologies to measure customer value during acquisition and use, in such a way so that the measures concurrently indicate the level of performance and more "accurately" identify the improvement opportunities.Design/methodology/approach - Customer value is indeed perceived by customers in the market (external customers) during acquisition, use, until the end of the product's lifetime. The producer is the entity that creates the products that the customers acquire or consume. Therefore, the producer needs to be aware, to interpret, and being actively involved in the creation of customer value. This view makes the "general agreement" that customer value is nothing else than customer perception in the market no longer relevant.Therefore, ValMEA (Value Modes Effects and Analysis) offers a "balanced" perspective on customer value, by recognising that customer value exists in different "modes" on different stages of the product's life cycle. The link between different "modes" of customer value becomes an important basis to understand the contributions of producer activities on customer value.Findings - Measuring customer value is necessary to capture the essential meaning of quality. However, the existing tools to measure customer value do not adequately manifest the concept of customer value itself. Therefore, the modification of these tools becomes the prerequisite to continuously improve quality performance. The measurement of customer value during acquisition and use is based on intangible aspects (cognitive judgement). Along the value stream, these measures are translated (transformed) into tangible aspects, which comprise aspects such as shorter lead-time, reduced defects, and lower costs.Originality/value - The customer value measures complement the existing methodology such as Six Sigma, Lean Production, and Quality Function Deployment (QFD). The integration of customer value measures with these methodologies lead to the development of a customer-value-driven quality improvement framework, where improvement opportunities can be captured repetitively. The continuous quality improvement efforts can then be categorised into reactive (based on "waste" identification) and proactive (based on customer value measurements).Keywords Customer value, performance indicator, improvement indicator, ValMEA, value map, P-I matrix.Paper type Conceptual paper