Is Customer Service an Art, a Science, or both? What makes it more one than the other?

The first dilemma regarding customer service is how to consistently deliver something that is often not understood? The second quandary is that once expectations seem clear, they change – so the question becomes how to track changing expectations, and then quickly translate that into a delivery system? One better sti

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For the past 25 years, American businesses have been focused on fine tuning their global supply chains, they have lowered inventory and decreased process time and eliminate cost. All of these efficiencies, and lean production methodologies have been built upon the principles of W. Edwards Deming utilizing sophisticated information technology. Today, more recent events such as political instability in Third World countries, terrorist strikes, piracy, and the shutdown of West Coast shipping docks… Continue

Cross docking is an excellent way to save money for warehousing and distribution companies when time is of the essence or the timing is just right. It allows items for customer orders to be transported from the receiving dock to the shipping dock door, the cross-docked product either to be shipped alone or added to an existing order. The key is that the product never leaves the dock area saving the time of transporting the receipt from the dock to the storage location and then picking the pro

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Many companies who use bar code technology are still plagued with excessive writing and/or data entry. This happens when many different types of information must be captured for each item during receiving and supplying vendors only bar code item numbers and/or descriptions and no other fields, or there are numerous potential next steps in the receiving process and they must be identified on the fly. These situations can occur whether for new receipts or returns (reverse logistics).

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Supply Chain Experts motto is that you are only as good as your weakest link, weak supply chain links have cost Boeing, the worlds largest airline manufacturer, billions of dollars and caused years of delays in their Dreamliner program. Today, as Boeing's new 787 Dreamliner program is progressing toward its first delivery, the jet maker is still working to repair its weak supply-chain links.

At the same time, overall jet sales for the year are way down. As of May 2009 the Boeing web site report… Continue

http://www.scholzandassociates.com/blog/2009/10/how-have-things-changed.aspx

Under some circumstances it is the seller not the buyer who has the advantage in a buy/sell relationship, (seller has a monopoly, resources to make products are always in short supply, demand fluctuates causing temporary short supply, etc.) The largest customers, oldest customers or those with personal relationships with the vendor usually get favorable treatment potentially hurting your competitive position.

When in a poor power position there are several things one can do to gain the favor of… Continue

Is a disconnect between purchasing and accounting impacting your supply chain scorecard?

One of the easiest ways to damage a buyer/seller relationship and not even know it’s happening is to toss an invoice over the wall to accounting and assume terms will be met. Payment terms are oftentimes stretched to preserve short-term cash reserves; sometimes breach of contract occurs beca

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To “Make” or “Buy”?

This subject is haunting many firms these days. Outsourcing problems include: Lack of flexibility, competing for (far away) resources, protecting proprietary information, challenges with different measurement systems, association with questionable business practices, lack of visibility into external environment factors at point of production, cost of freight, potential loss of competen

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Most companies that we visit have to cope with determining which products to stock to keep their customers happy and what would happen to both their competitive position and profits if they did not stock all items their customers could possibly want. What we often see when we visit those companies is distribution centers in which over 50% of their space is filled with products that sell poorly and overstock on most of those products as well.

We can calculate the cost of the extra warehouse spac… Continue