Most organizations—perhaps yours is one of them—truly believe they are fulfilling their on-time in-full (OTIF) promises to their customers. But a recent survey from Bain & Company should give them pause. In that survey, 80% of respondents believed they delivered a “superior customer experience.” But customers sang a different tune: they stated that only 8% of companies were really delivering what they wanted.
Keeping our customer promises should always be front and center of any organization’s efforts. But that is not easy to achieve when procurement and customer service — two sides of the same coin in improving supply chain performance— are not working seamlessly together. Too often, each one views the other as “not understanding our side of the business”, torpedoing any chance of a collaborative effort. We should take caution from the well-known saying: “To go fast, go alone. To go far, go together.”
It takes active listening and cohesiveness to go together and work toward the fine tuning of an organization’s supply chain. When that happens, we reach the sweet spot of becoming the customer that suppliers are eager to work with and sell to as a partner (customer of choice) and become the supplier that customers are eager to work with and buy from as a partner (supplier of choice).
