I am a career sales professional that is unnaturally excited when it comes to the business of mobile sales service and delivery. To some, this is known as Direct Store Delivery (DSD), to others it is vending or field service. In the end it is all about improving the way you serve customers using technology in a direct customer interaction.
As the Director of Sales for the Delivery Division, I have the opportunity to work with business owners and senior managers in seeing and recommending ways to improve business processes that result in improved sales and better operating efficiencies. With a Bachelor of Commerce Degree in Finance from Concordia University in Montreal QC, I believe there is always a bottom line to any technology investment.
My blog will deal mostly with the business of improving operating efficiencies and sharing strategy ideas using mobile sales, service and delivery technologies.
In true fashion, the technology industries have taken all of the meaning out of seemingly descriptive terms such as business intelligence (BI), web-portals and virtually all other terms currently used for non-paper based reporting. Almost every business owner or manager that I know runs their business off of one or two key reports or metrics. If the systems they are buying can provide or simplify the process of getting that information, then the chances of the investment being made are greatly amplified. However, more and more we are seeing a departure from flat file paper type report formats.
We live in an active world. People want to be alerted when critical things happen; they don’t have the time or the patience to go looking. Tomorrow’s applications need to take an active approach to all reporting functions ranging from simple invoicing through crucial activities. I have spoken about some of these in previous posts.
· Don’t print invoices at the point of delivery. Have them delivered electronically to the proper recipients. No paper is lost, it provides an audit trail and it improves the speed of payment. The car rental companies are doing this today; I get my receipt before I leave the rental compound. Imagine doing this in the DSD environment.
· Send email alerts to managers, clients and suppliers on critical events. The airlines do this today when your plane is running late. Dynamic scheduling and dispatch holds the same promise in delivery environments.
· Dashboards, business intelligence etc … single screen views of what is going on in the work environment that clearly mark problems and allow you to drill down on them. Here is the next key: people don’t work at their desks anymore. We need to get that data onto the Blackberry, iPhone and Android devices being carried by mobile users.
· Send alerts and advisories to text message or messenger sites … make it real time, active and actionable.
My generation lives in an e-mail world. Even that is quickly going away and being replaced with TXT and Messenger environments. The key to remaining relevant in a real-time word is getting critical point information in front of the right people as it happens. Dealing with the constant barrage of information will be the next problem. However, today we have to deal with the fact that no one can or will be bothered to run a report or print the paper. If business decision makers run their businesses based on a single report today, what does the next generation of data factor look like? We use paper due to lack of a viable alternative. Today, those alternatives exist and our addictions to paper are being replaced with a more potent and enrapturing electronic alternative. Our kids are already there; that means that business needs to catch up.
Related posts
Being in the handheld based solution business for quite awhile now, there is this voice in my head that keeps saying that there is more to the whole Smartphone thing than simply changing the device we capture our mobile sales, service and delivery transactions on. The fight for the mobile desk top is still raging on and there is no clear winner in sight. Open architectures that can span the operating systems will have a definite advantage. In the ruggedized space, at least for the near term, Microsoft rules the way. However, that cannot be said for what is being carried in the pockets of executives, sales people and even the man on the street.
Route Accounting and DSD systems are fantastic at collecting data. They collect information about sales, location, inventory, trends, specials, lost sales, movements and the list goes on. Then this little light goes on; what about creating a data push model to the outside world? The new killer app may not be in changing the way we collect the data but what we do with it. Some of this requires software, other parts of it are just implementation.
- IMAGINE: The CEO receives up to the minute sales vs. expected data on his iPhone with drill down data against individual line items or categories that are not meeting the plan.
- IMAGINE: Pre-sending the predicted “Suggested” or “Perfect” order calculated by the Route Accounting System to the customer’s BlackBerry and having them pre-approve or edit the orders and add special instructions.
- IMAGINE: After a driver makes a delivery stop, alerting the merchandiser and the customer AP team that the order is on-sight and is ready for the next step.
- IMAGINE: Your customer can push orders and requirements based on current stock levels from his Android phone to update stock levels and recalculate suggested order levels.
The answer here is that we can completely change the customer interaction paradigm from a push only environment to an interactive environment. The “web” based customer portal is the past already. The new battleground is in the pocket of the businessman. Two years ago, I did about 20% of my email on my phone and I would never surf the web. Today I use my phone and my desktop interchangeably. Our market is changing, the users are much more technically able. This is the most exciting time ever to be involved with handheld technology. There is a revolution underway. It will be a game of leading or dying as the way customers interact with suppliers evolves to a new reality in all facets of business.
In the technology world we hear a lot about “best practices.” This is usually a carefully couched catch phrase that means “we did it our way and you should do it that way.” This is one of those over abused phrases that needs to be added to everyone’s Board Room Bingo game and never used again. With that said, there are truly best of breed methods that lead the industry. However, the application of these methods needs to be highly personalized. There is more than one way to do things and the term “best” depends on many factors that influence that particular situation.
In software, if there was a best then we wouldn’t need multiple vendors and we certainly wouldn’t need consultants to understand the business and implement solutions that maximize the business benefits to the company. Solutions need to be highly configurable to adapt to the “best fit” for each and every customer. There are many ways to do that. You can take the workflow modeling process or you can take a flag driven process. Direct Store Delivery environments are highly dynamic and business processes may need to change on a dime. Unfortunately, many DSD organizations don’t really have the luxury of IT departments to run their route accounting systems and mobile delivery software. The tools built into the system need to be deployed so that normal business people can change, test and deploy them without the luxury of techie folks.
We hear people talk about “best practices” as a way to combat “highly configurable” as an implementation approach. It sounds so good and it looks great on a PowerPoint slide. After all, it’s the “best.” Believe me that anyone who is in the business can configure the industry standard methods. They simply wouldn’t survive in the business if they couldn’t. Let’s start with that as a given. The real trick is finding partners and software providers who can reflect your business in the software and help you grow. Making it a practice is best, not a best practice.
Change is something we all live with but often makes us very uncomfortable. People in general like to have things stay the way they are; not for any other reason that that it is what they are used to. Even the worst way of doing something in the world can seem better than change. Sometimes, the worst critics of a given way of doing something will all of a sudden be big supporters of the original way of doing things as soon as you try to change it … odd but true. I have even seen cases where a person left one company because they hated the systems they had in place, went to the new company to implement a new solution and put the same one in because he knew it … crazy, but it happens more often than you would think.
I couldn’t help but notice the parallel between the environment we implement new Direct Store Delivery systems and the environment in which we serve our customers. We recently had the opportunity to realign our support and account management strategies to provide a single point of contact for each of our customers. There is no more trying to find the right office and the right person for each and every contact point at HighJump. There is normal resistance to this process as our customers are used to calling around to find the right people. After awhile you can’t pass the ball down the line any faster so you need to find a new way to pass the ball. Change comes at a price. See the example above.
Thankfully we are meeting with a lot of support for our changes. One place to call for problems, one account manager for each customer who is also responsible for all other customers in that industry or customer group. People are uncomfortable none the less; we expect and respect that. Change takes time and effort. We can’t wait for 2010 and the promise it shows in delivering a new level of support and service to our customers. Under the “old way” we simply couldn’t do it.
Our customers go under a tremendous amount of change when they deploy our systems. We are undergoing tremendous change as we re-organize to offer a world class organization. We are so appreciative for our customers and the willingness to work with us. It takes all of us working together to be truly great. The customer relationship is a key and we hope to bring that to a new level in 2010.
There is an interesting term I have heard over the years about people who do the actual direct store delivery job. It goes something like, “If you are smart enough to do the job you may be too smart to take it.” The implication is that to do a really good job you need to have a kind of personal discipline and commitment to success as well as skill with people and sales that are not often found in industries where there is such a physical component. I have had the pleasure of working with and meeting many superstars in this industry; they are truly one of a kind individuals and are very talented. There is a true disconnect between the incentives put in place for many of these talents and a kind of regimented distrust that is prevalent in the DSD industry.
This brings us to the topic du jour. Much of the incentive in the industry is sometimes based around a relative distrust of the workforce. This can be demotivating in many cases. One of the most interesting strategies I have seen is by taking the normal performance metrics and including the route people in a kind of daily planning. The route supervisor meets each route man at the end of every day with a pile of reports: sales, returns, missed stops, time reports etc. and having a daily meeting. You change this meeting from being a performance meeting to being a planning meeting to go over what went right and what went wrong. Out of that, you develop strategies to improve tomorrow. Then you pay the route people on performance improvements.
Posting any great ideas or trends on a weekly board creates a kind of buzz around improving the sales. The people on the road are often quite bright and often underutilized. This experience can be used for the good of the company as long as you just ask. Of course there are exceptions. By and large, the biggest improvements in your very particular world are sitting at your fingertips for the asking. Often the man on the street simply feels no one would listen if they suggested something. What great opportunities lie out there. Our mobile delivery customers that have done this are getting spectacular results. Just a thought: turn the punitive controls into positive affirmation and change the culture.
Almost every company spends time and energy on customer focused marketing campaigns and strategies. We go to trade shows, buy advertising and put up great websites. Strangely, we spend almost no time or effort on marketing to our own people so that they carry that message forward to the customer as an enthusiastic advocate for the company. The people who deal with the customers are the best carriers of the corporate banner; a few bad apples spoil the entire basket.
As we deploy mobile sales, service and delivery systems for our direct store delivery and route accounting systems customers, it occurred to me that we are putting a device in the hand of everyone who directly serves our customers. We actively tell people about the great multi-media features that are available in these mobile delivery devices. You can show slides or commercials and look at spreadsheets. Why isn’t this device being used to market the value of the company to carrier rather than just the end customer? We track quotas and targets, maybe we could use it to improve and mold the impression our people have of the companies they work for.
Nothing sells better than enthusiasm and a belief in what they do. My thinking here is that with so much of our lives being interacted with through web-based and hand-held based technology, we could take a page out the internet book and ensure our own people are surrounded by the messaging they should be bringing to the customers. Everyone is on Twitter and Facebook; we are all used to seeing banner ads and messages all day long. What if we used that type of idea to reinforce the ideas we want carried forward about our own company or products. Many of these adds are contextual; think about how that might work when you sales person is dealing with a specific customer face to face.
This might be one of those cases where we are so used to working on one end of a problem that we didn’t know the other end existed. Just a random thought ...
One thing that is common in almost all route accounting systems and direct store delivery systems is that at some point we need to get the order, sales and inventory information back to an ERP or accounting system. Systems integration has been a problem for real world technology implementations ever since the very first computer system. As soon as you build something, you will need it to speak to something else. The problem is that the something else was likely built in a different technology that may be nothing like the first system. So how do you start?
The first things we always urge our customers to consider are:
1. Where does the single version of the truth (accurate information) need to reside and when does it need to be up to date?
2. Where (which system) will generate each type of transaction and do other systems need to know or be updated when that happens?
By carefully documenting all of the critical processes in the information chain, the interface requirements become self-evident. All that remains are the decisions about timing data management. You would think that over 50 years into the age of computing that there would be a nice onc-size-fits-all integration tool that anyone can plug into and voila you have an interface. Unfortunately, this toll has yet to emerge at a price point that is reasonable for most common business users. Integration is still largely a programming or scripting task that has to be done by technical people and/or programmers.
Many companies include interface toolkits that allow you to simplify the task. There is no common standard that allows everyone to integrate to a common point. In a world filled with standards and protocols you would think that some common point integration technology would have emerged. Until then we are left with creating our own toolsets that allow data manipulation, scripting and error correction. We will continue to work with the experts from the target system. However, it seems like the next emerging technology needs to bring us into an age of universal communications. XML and technologies of this nature were supposed to get us there but it seems to still fall short. What will the next ten years bring, maybe a new language?
The level of activity in the direct store delivery and route accounting systems market seems to be at an all time high. People who are not automated are looking at automation, and long time users are now looking at “the next step.” The interesting bit is that this year has made virtually everyone look at protecting their businesses against business inefficiencies that are amplified by changing economic decisions. If nothing else, this year has been a wakeup call to many in the food and beverage industry to take care of some of the easy laziness that develops over time and run more efficient route businesses.
One of the trends over the last few weeks in this blog has been how to grind more sales out of the existing operation. This week I don’t have any leading advice or best practices to share but I wanted to talk a bit about the act of measurement itself. Everyone talks about KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) and metrics. Everyone has their favorite number that they like to share. One of the things that is often overlooked is the physical mechanism used to capture the metric and whether or not it is a direct result of the activity you are trying to measure or simply an interesting parallel number. Counting the number of chickens on an egg farm is not a good measure of egg production, it is a good measure of potential producers. You really need to be looking at the number of eggs per chicken or something along those lines.
Direct store delivery does not have a standard that can be referenced. Cases per mile is only good if everyone runs the same number of miles and has a similar account base. What is interesting is the change in the measure itself (damn calculus). Acceleration is the rate in change of speed (the first derivative of speed for math nuts). We can capture a lot of great static data in the route world that is similar to measuring the speed of a car. I think we get into some really interesting measures when we start looking at the rate of change in those metrics. That rate of change gives you a much more applicable metric to apply to all routes because it rules out the geographic specific pieces of the measure. Now we just have to figure out how to do it …
Good things come from speaking with users. Last week we had our annual user convention in Florida. This is fantastic gathering of HighJump customers from around the world and across our many solution sets. I am always humbled by the ways customers use the system in innovative ways. Very often we get to see these little nuggets of brilliance that are being used in the field.
Normally I shy away from talking about our products. However, in order to tell the story, I need to give you a couple of tidbits. In one of our flagship direct store delivery software (DSD), route accounting systems (RAS), called HighJump Route Administrator™, we have a feature called suggested order. It allows you to create a calculation script that suggests which products to put on the shelf and the proper quantities. One of the possible data points that can be captured and used is the current customer quantity on hand. If you capture that on every visit you can calculate your sell through rates and inventory turnover. We had always spoken about this as a way to ensure you avoided two situations: Product expiring on the shelf (waste) and running out of product (lost sales).
One of our customers explained to us the fortunate unexpected consequence of doing this. When you set up a new store with your products you make a lot of guesses about the profile of that store and the products that they will sell. You tend to use a lot anecdotal experience and demographic data. However, in the end it is a bit of a best guess. Outside factors that are very hard to account for tend to affect the sales at any individual selling point. The unexpected consequence of measuring the Customer Quantity on Hand at each visit and adjusting the Suggested Build-to levels is that the product mix ends up self adjusting to account for the actual sales profile of that store. In fact, it does this very quickly. Even if you get it completely wrong at the beginning, it will adjust itself within a few weeks. Using a little bit of smarts, you can also then make some assumptions about new products to put in that location and just as easily test the viability of those new products in that location. If you are really clever, you can also measure the impact on the rest of the product mix by adding or subtracting different lines. Carefully adding and subtracting lines on 6 week interval to drive product excitement has a drastic impact on bottom line profitability.
Your DSD data tells you everything you need to know about shelf level execution and the product mix effect of different product availability. This leads you into food cost planning and profitability. Who knew …
The human race is kind of crazy in that we seem to organize everything into neat little buckets. If you were to drop in from space these would seem to make absolutely no sense. Being in sales, the difference between closing a deal this Wednesday (September 30) and next Wednesday is paramount even though it would make no difference to the company in the long term. The difference in that small snapshot is critical. In most Direct Store Delivery businesses this arbitrary cutoff can be divided into much more manageable and achievable goals. In high transaction, low dollar businesses, you can’t leave it to the last minute. Every day is quarter end to some extent in this type of business.
If you tell someone how they are measured, in general they can tell you how they will behave. Following that logic, if you don’t measure it, don’t expect it to happen. Very often, this key step is missed and we are left at the end of a period wondering why all of our hopes and dreams didn’t come true. In route sales, by publishing and tracking daily, weekly and quarterly goals, you can keep the field team motivated to sell that extra box, do one more stop or prospect for one more customer. Growth comes from a lot of “one mores” put together in a line. It very rarely comes from some monumental single event. More importantly, it is critical to communicate that these goals/targets are being watched. No one will care about the goal if you don’t demonstrate that you care about it. One of our most successful customers literally meets each and every routeman when they come in the door at the end of the day to review the day’s activities, results and to plan for the next day. Active management in a team environment where everyone is committed to the same goals and results creates a pretty amazing selling environment. They may not make their numbers every quarter, but they make it or lose it together and they know where they stand every day.
Sometimes we tend to look at the end goal and don’t give any thought to how we will fill the void between where we are and where we go. I think my daughter said it best when she said “just one more daddy.” Kids have this figured out when they are 4; it seems to take us adults a lot longer. Everyone is saying that times are tough. As a collective team, if we all just do “one more” (whatever that might be) then we harness a lot of productive power into our businesses.
There is this ago old idea that if your route sales team could serve customers faster, they would be able to serve more customers in the course of the day. If you could do that, you might be able to operate fewer routes. In a vacuum, that is great logic and makes a ton of sense. However, there are two things that get in the way and need to be a part of the capacity planning process for your Direct Store Delivery (DSD) environment.
1. Is there any incentive or way to ensure that your sales team sees more customers rather than just going home earlier?
2. Is there a point at which serving a customer faster reduces the volume of sales done at that customer?
For the first case, it is important to properly compensate and/or motivate serving more customers. The first thing we need to do is ensure that we remove physical barriers to serving customers. This is largely done with technology to make sure all of the calculation and grunt work is taken out of the process. (Enter HighJump Software's direct store delivery software for a shameless plug). A couple of principles come into play. You want to make sure that the sales team perceives an increase in their earning potential when weighed against the workload of adding an additional customer. There needs to be a definite effort vs. return benefit to them. We also need to balance the point at which we out-serve the capacity of a geographic market. This leads into the second point.
Just about everyone has gone to McDonald’s where everything is designed to serve you quickly rather than developing a strong relationship with your server. The entire principle of the Direct Sales environment is about being a part of the customers business and developing a relationship and building the business together. My last blog post dealt with this in more detail. However, safe to say that it is important that we build business development time and activities into the sales cycle and enabling technologies to help them build the business and increase profitability rather than just be fast. An important use of capacity is to build on the sales with your existing customers by placing new products and lines and improving the merchandising and placement of existing lines to drive better business.
If you find yourself with capacity planning issues, it is critical to take some of these factors into consideration or you may be leaving capacity unused on the table. That is just like throwing away cash. No one likes to do that.
In route sales, direct store delivery (DSD) or any type of sales where you have to go see the customer, more customers isn’t always better. When they walk in your door, the more the better. When you have to drive to see them, there becomes a point when you shouldn’t drive any further. In this case, the 80/20 rule is alive and healthy (The Pareto Principal). Eighty percent of your revenue comes from 20% of your customers. Does it make sense to look at the customer base and optimize your mobile sales operations to maximize the revenue/profit potential rather than just making sure they drive the best route? Traditional “route optimization” may fall somewhat short if you look at it only from a miles driven perspective.
Some of the more innovative players are starting to look at metrics such as “cases per mile” or “dollars per mile.” These are great route performance metrics, but they end up being somewhat attached to the specific route that customer is on that day. What about the customer performance metric? If we go back to Pareto, we can make a couple of interesting observations. If 80% of my sales come from 20% of my customers, then possibly 80% of our loss comes from 20% of the customers. So let’s look at only two groups. The top 20% of the customers and the bottom 20% of the customers. Let’s not change a thing for that middle 60%; we will assume that we serve them correctly and they are basically happy.
What if we were to take that top 20% that provide the bulk of the revenue and change our model so that they are served better? Maybe they will be served more often or by more people. The idea here is over-serve our best customers and partner with them to improve our already thriving and profitable business with them. This might include having an account manager/sales person, a merchandiser and delivery function where it makes sense. We may serve them 7 days a week where other customer may be served 3 or 5 days a week. The idea here is to get better at what we are already good at and build on our strengths.
Maybe we should be looking at serving the bottom 20% less than we do already. It is possible that we can make the same or more money by reducing their service levels down to one or two days a week if we have to drive too far to serve them or they do not buy a minimum level of product? Perhaps service charges are required for customers who do not buy in quantity. Some customer may not be worth having (perish the thought). In our society we sometimes try to “improve on our weaknesses.” We get better at things that we will never be great at and in so doing also make ourselves more attractive to customers that are not in our primary target audience.
So back to the premise, by over-serving customers that we want to attract we then get even better at what we are already good at. We make ourselves less attractive to customers that do not fit the business as well and we end up improving profitability. We can then extend this customer analysis to geographic revenue clusters to figure out of there are areas we should be over-serving above and beyond the individual client. Having fewer but better customers may be a possible reality.
Ok, so it’s not that funny. In the business world, cash has always been king. In fact, preferential treatment and pricing are often offered to customers who pay cash. In many parts of the world, many of those inside of North America, carrying cash is a dangerous idea. Cab drivers are often targeted because they are known for carrying cash. Recently we have heard of people in our business who are being robbed and in some cases killed for the cash they carry. A life can be worth a surprisingly small amount of cash to someone who is desperate.
In tough times, companies equally do not want to carry Accounts Receivables. Cash is still king but death seems to be a rather high price to pay. You can pay for a pizza or a cab at your front door using a credit card machine. This is technology that we are seeing find its way into the wholesale business as well. For many years it was a fringe idea in Direct Store Delivery (DSD). With lives in the balance it is finding a steady re-birth. This comes at a cost; there are transaction fees and processing cost that are associated with each transaction and the underlying service. This is certainly a way we are seeing the business go.
This leads me to another thought. Debit cards are becoming increasingly popular. Debit is really a “pre-paid” account. If cash is king and we offer better terms to our customers who pay cash, what would we do for customers who choose to pay in advance? This does away with cash, eliminates the A/R problem and avoids all of the transaction fees and processing problems associated with credit cards. In fact, you could potentially have a negative A/R balance. Most of the systems will handle that scenario. One could conceive of creating a conditional price schedule based on the current A/R balance. If you do business with the same customers every day and have for a long time, would they really object to the idea of being ahead on their payments as long as there was a business benefit? All that and it could save a life … nothing like a little prime time news melodrama for effect.
ESP is all you need to get it right every time. Now back on planet earth we need a slightly better approach. Most of our mobile sales (DSD) customers are after that magic pill that tells them exactly what to have on the truck and what everyone will sell. The problem is that no one can really tell you how to calculate it. The good news is that it is easier to predict what your total volume of customers will buy vs. an individual customer. The law of averages works in your favor. In our adventures in selling direct store delivery solutions, everyone says they want to pre-populate their orders for their drivers and salespeople. Sometimes we are talking about just putting in a shopping list of products that this customer normally buys and then adding the quantities later. Some people want to be a lot more scientific. Often the question of how to calculate the perfect order is met with a stunned silence. What about the scientific approach?
Using some rudimentary calculations it is pretty easy to figure out the average amount of each product that is sold to a customer in an average week or day. We can also calculate the average variance from that average. This gives you something called standard deviation. In the normal course of business, the vast majority (usually 99%) will come within three standard deviations from that average. If you trying to do this for an individual customer you would be looking the behavior of that one guy; that is very hard to predict. If you look at the number for all the customers on your route and break that into days of the week or even weeks of the month, then you have a pretty reliable number. Using this number on a given day and adding three deviations worth of product should ensure that you never run out. Because we don’t start from empty in most cases, it also ensures that we turn inventory over on the trucks. The perfect truck load gives you the ability minimize weight and ensure you serve the customer every time.
Now take that same calculation and expand it for the entire company. This gives you a bigger population of data and therefore a more accurate number. This number can be used to optimizer order quantities and drive manufacturing. All of this from a simple attempt to give your driver a list of products that are likely to be sold to save a little bit of typing. I knew stats class would come in handy someday.
Every conversation I have had with a new customer around automation always seems to include some discussion of reducing paper. Many customers have been extremely successful in reducing the paper that is generated internally. Some technologies that are specifically using direct store delivery software include DEX and/or EDI to limit or eliminate customer-side paper. This works very well for large customers. With that said, it is amazing how often these electronic transactions are supported by a printed form. It’s a bit crazy if you really think about why these systems were developed in the first place. Most convenience stores, gas stations and restaurants are still operated by local owner operators and these technologies are not readily accessible to them. They are stuck with, wait for it … more paper.
Let’s take a new millennium look at what customer-facing paperless could mean in the route accounting systems world. Most people today are getting used to receiving their bank statements and various types of bills in electronic format. When I rent a car, I almost instantly receive an email with a PDF electronic version of my final invoice. Strangely, the demand for this in mobile delivery, sales, and service has not been strong, but I believe it is coming. In the wireless environment, we can capture orders, convert them to invoices, take and apply payments and then capture a signature. This is all transmitted back to the host in real time. Imagine the owner of the store or the accountant receiving that invoice electronically just as fast. There is no chance that the sixteen year old working the counter at the time loses that document, and it provides an electronic delivery trail.
Sometimes we over-think these things. Simple solutions often yield the biggest impact. A toaster isn’t complex but it is a lot easier than lighting a fire to make the bread crunchy.
Photo via Flicr user luxomedia.
As I begin blogging, I hope my thoughts are useful to some you out there. The power of the internet is the transactions and interactions that it creates. This is where collaborative magic happens and I look forward to the conversations and feedback that are created.
In working with literally hundreds of customers over the last 20 years in the IT business, I see a similar problem all of the time. People invest a great deal of time and money to implement new state of the art technology so that they can be leading edge and then spend an equally staggering amount on making it do what they do today. The argument is often cloaked in well founded arguments around how the processes they have are working and don’t need to be changed. The horse and buggy, quill pen and typewriters all worked as well. This approach is particularly evident when organizations are changing their direct store delivery software and route accounting systems.
When we dig into it, we find that a lot of the processes we see in the field are created due to physical limitations that were caused by data only being communicated when field representatives returned to the office or the physical passing of paper. With wireless communications and real-time information those limitations are gone. This creates the opportunity to rethink some of those basic assumptions. If we receive orders in real time, do we really need to wait until tonight or tomorrow to pick them? If the inventory is already on a truck that is nearby, can’t we just dispatch that truck and call it done? It is really about using our workflow management solutions to change the way we work. Fax machines were state of the art less than 20 years ago. Wireless technology is changing the way customers want us to serve them. The real question is, will we keep up and create the opportunities that grew our traditional businesses in the first place?
Image via Flickr user Beaverton Historical Society.
Powered by Compendium Blogware