Supply chain performance and customer experience: truth or illusion?
Aart Willem de Wolf
Published at
We often only hear what we want to hear and see what we want to see. In a recent article in Dutch daily newspaper NRC Handelsblad dr. Harald Merkelbach, professor psychology and law at Maastricht University, explained clearly that all our observations depend on context. Our truths are often fueled by self-created contexts or prejudices. It is not surprising that illusionists have been using this trick with success for decades. Likewise, this is the case with the OTIF (On-Time-In-Full) metric.
During a recent supply chain event, we hosted a round table discussion. One of the questions was: “How good is your supply performance from an on-time delivery perspective?” No single participant stated to perform below 95% on time. This overlaps with our experience at other companies. But is this true?
Here are a few pointy questions you might want to raise if you believe nothing is what it seems.
- Are you measuring against the first requested delivery date of your customer?
- Are you taking all order lines into scope of the measurement?
- Are you truly measuring based on the actual delivery date at your customer’s doorstep?
- Are all order lines foreseen of the actual delivery date which you’ve received back from your logistics provider?
If at least one of these questions is answered with no, your view of reality might be shaped by managed data. The question is: do you accept this? Or do you prefer to look at the reality as your customer experiences it.
SPAN
One thing is clear; if you like to connect your customer experience to your supply chain performance, it is highly recommended to take your customer’s view. Next step is to implement their view in your daily metric. At R&G we’ve developed a data-driven approach to have this reflected into a diagnostic metric. This metric allows you to keep a customer’s perspective by showing earlies & lates and the actual time that your orders have been delivered. The metric is called SPAN. It is part of R&G’s stable supply chain improvement approach.
So, don’t have a blind belief in your own observations. They might be biased by context, desired outcome or prejudice. And then your truth is an illusion.
Aart Willem de Wolf is managing partner at R&G Global Consultants.
