A reader wrote: “My company has configurable products and we are having problems getting the right parts delivered to support the installation of the customers’ orders. What ideas do you have to resolve this?”
The first question I would ask is did the process for shipping custom, configurable orders ever work well? If you answer “yes,” then you need to ask yourself “what changed?” If you answer “no,” then it would be clear you never had a working process and that is your starting point.
If something in the process changed, you need to take action to bring the process back into compliance so it works properly and is repeatable.
If nothing changed, you need to create and follow a process that ensures you are shipping the right parts to complete the order.
If the answer you receive is, “it’s too hard to do it right,” then I encourage you to look at the problem through the eyes of your customers and/or dealers. If your customers and/or dealers are experiencing challenges satisfying the customer the first time, that negatively impacts your brand reputation.
When order execution goes poorly, people talk about it. If you don’t believe that, just look at Yelp, Facebook or Twitter to see how brand reputations become tarnished. Companies delivering poor customer experience aren’t long for this world.
Finally, you may need to innovate your current process to meet the needs of your business if variety and complexity have gone beyond the capabilities of your current systems and processes. This is how you accelerate growth.
Photo Courtesy of John Hritz on Flickr
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