Continuous improvement is the mantra of some of the most successful business organizations. Even in supply chain management, where it seems that a business has already perfected its systems and processes, there’s always room for further improvement. This will help you provide better service and customer satisfaction for your primary client.
Your main objective in continuous improvement is to identify gaps and opportunities for further improving the service you provide to your clients. If you’re looking for ways to improve your supply chain management capabilities, you might want to look into integrated supply chain services.
Here are a few other suggestions on how you can offer better services to your client.
1. Do An End-To-End Analysis
One of the first few things you can do if you’re looking to deliver better service for your supply chain management (SCM) clients is an end-to-end analysis. Gather people from all departments or units involved in the SCM process. You can task them with reviewing the entire SCM system and process. This will allow them to identify any gaps or inefficiencies. You can also use data analytics technology to help in the review.
By doing an end-to-end analysis, you’ll be able to identify specific gaps or opportunities for improvement, as well as see the overall system and how everything comes together. It doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll find something wrong with the SCM setup; you might just see a few gaps or flaws here and there.
In looking to deliver better client service, you should try to identify ways to reduce time spent on certain tasks, as well as ways to bring down expenses. These two are the easiest to quantify and measure, though they’re not the only areas of opportunity for improvement. You can also review your client’s SCM process for possible redundancies or roundabout processes that can be further simplified or streamlined.
2. Focus On Client’s Core Objectives
You should make sure to focus your efforts on your client’s core objectives. If you provide services for the whole SCM process of your client, this gives you the room to make changes where they’re needed. But even if you’re providing services or solutions for only a portion of the SCM process, you can still find ways to improve.
For example, if you provide logistics solutions and transporting services to a food processing company, you can offer to review the schedule and routing of the pickup, transportation, delivery, and unloading of their products. If you pick up from several hubs, plants, or processing centers, you can propose to do a review.
The review should be focused on how to optimize the whole schedule and routing system. There might be ways to reduce the number of trips made or to use the backload as an opportunity to deliver other items or transport to nearby delivery points.
3. Train The Front Lines To Enhance The Customer Experience Of The End User
If you have some level of interaction with the client or end user, that’s another opportunity to create value-added service for your client. You can, for instance, focus on enhancing customer experience if you’re the service provider for the customer support hotline or the portal for the monitoring and tracking of deliveries.
As a service provider for the customer support operations of your client, you can also conduct a review of the whole process of customer service engagement and operations. Your objective here would be to look for further opportunities to improve the experience of your client’s users or customers whenever they contact customer support.
4. Integrate Order Entry And Customer Service Systems
If you’re the service provider for both your client’s supply chain order entry and fulfillment systems, as well as the customer service systems, you have the opportunity to propose that their order entry system be integrated with the customer service systems. This will give their customers a seamless experience, which would greatly contribute to customer satisfaction.
An example is if you provide the order entry and fulfillment platform as well as the customer service portal for your client and they’re separate systems. The end users would have to interact with one platform for order entry and then another for customer service. They might not know this if you don’t say outright that a separate entity handles the customer support operations.
However, this doesn’t mean they won’t experience the separation of your order entry and customer support systems. They might have an idea if the customer support frontliners admit or disclose that they can’t answer some of the customers’ queries because they don’t have access to certain tools in the order entry platform. This may negatively affect customer satisfaction because their issue won’t be easily resolved and they’re being made to wait due to the divide in the order entry and customer support systems.
Conclusion
You should conduct an end-to-end analysis of your client’s SCM system and process so you can get both the big-picture view and the details of what needs to be improved. With the information you get from the review, you can identify specific gaps and opportunities for improvement. You can suggest intelligent pickup and delivery scheduling and routing systems, train frontline customer service support, and also integrate customer service portals and order entry systems.
