HOW WELL DO YOU KNOW YOUR CUSTOMERS NEEDS?

Do you get frequent emergency orders?

How does your customer really feel about your performance?

How do you feel about your customer?  (Please don't give me the “customer is always right” speech)

Are there opportunities for you both to save money and inventory?

Do you and the customer agree on the goals and objectives – do you know what they are?

Do you understand how your customer operates?

Do they understand your operations?

 

Seems simple right?  Well I’ve spent the last 14 years trying to perfect the best tool to drive this kind of discussion.  Some call it the SLEA (Site Level Executional Agreement) a tool meant to drive rich discussions for both the customer and the supplier, documenting all the actions that are efficient (or driving towards “no touch”).

 

In this document we begin with detailed segments:  Feedstock strategy, production and inventory philosophy, quality requirements and expectations, ramp up and down plans, planning lead times, communication expectations, business continuity plans, downtime schedules and broad spectrum contacts.  All of these segments help both parties understand each other's position and flushes forward any risks or outages to be detailed on an action plan summary.

 

This tool requires pre-work, coordination and generally lots of post work to ensure you can answer the above with confidence and drive sustainable improvements.  It also requires a multi-functional team internally and externally to drive the best results.  Post meetings generally summarize to the leadership the outcomes/finds, watch-outs and potential needs for alignment for cost, risk or inventory changes.

 

Being a good practioner of this type of communication document is generally enhanced by – industry knowledge, openness to hear the hard truth, and willingness to probe the “sacred cows”.  You have to be willing to challenge internally as well as externally.  Sometimes what you want is impossible or costs too much and people are apprehensive to put the moose on the table.

 

These types of meeting are generally driven with select relationships that fall into a few categories for me personally:  Large/Complex with Risk; Relationship/Reliability Issues; or a New Relationship.  Staffing and experience will really determine how many of these critical discussions you can have, as even with the well established relationships – inefficiencies will arise out of these meetings that will drive follow up work.

 

Action planning – so really critical to keep this a living document.  Too many times I’ve witnessed the massive amount of work and time to coordinate and execute the above discussions for them to fall into a computer file and not to be opened again.  This is a complete waste of time and effort – if you cannot follow up, don’t have the meetings.

 

Personnel changes – a huge opportunity of this kind of documentation – with the rapid change of personnel in most companies this process creates a historical roadmap of why and how things are done and also provides a great opportunity to be used as a training document for new members on either side of the supply chain.

 

Know when to say “when” – when you have achieved your desired goals and feel you have the optimization down – move on.  Ensure you have some maintenance communication and some results indicators to let you know if the process is failing, take your resources and begin to expand your horizons of new supply chains to optimize.  Many make a critical mistake of trying to do this process with “ALL” – your staffing and results will suffer if you attempt this strategy.  Tier your supply relationships and make a 5 year plan!