36 ◾ The Innovative Lean Enterprise
to pay more for the new performance levels using a series of customer
focus groups and surveys administered to customers and distributors. The
company also learned at the end of the study that the new formulation
allows for virtually any color tire, which created a new level of uniqueness
never realized.
The product fulfillment map is a good tool for immediately analyzing and
finding opportunities in the marketplace. It can be used for a current set of
offerings as well as proposed offerings. This tool can be expanded to com-
pare your offerings to those of your competitors if desired. In later chapters,
additional examples of the product fulfillment map will be illustrated.
As previously stated, opportuniti ...