 Shopping at Our Clients
There is not better way to get to know your Clients than to shop their store. We started working this month with Total Hockey, a specialty retailer, e-tailer and distribution company. This is a fast-growth company who does some amazing things in the area of supply chain management.
I don't play Hockey, but it turns out they have some gear I use for my physical fitness training.
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 Mitch's Ph.D Supply Chain Research It dawned on my that you may be wondering what I am researching as part of this Ph.D program I embarked on a few years ago. Here is a list of the Sales & Supply Chain Alignment research area. - Correlation of supply chain focused metrics with customer profitability. Or... do customers that the supply chain loves make for profitable customers?
- Using multiple performance metrics to rank customers (this works best for B2B customers)
- Allocating sales and customer service time to existing customers optimally to drive profit
- Does aligning the sales force and the supply chain (or departments that deliver the service or product) improve company performance
- Sales strategies that affect supply chain decisions, and Supply Chain strategies that affect sales decisions
- Optimal assortment in Industrial distribution. Is a B2B sales rep's memory like a grocery store, where low performing items "crowd-out" high performing items?
- I have about 10 other ideas for supply chain models, but this is a good start. This one works well for distribution companies.
I can always use data to test the models I am developing. If any of these questions sound interesting to you give me a call (314-406-4962) or reply to this email. I am also creating models for inventory optimization and lean manufacturing methods.
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Sales Process Improvement
Our case study company is a manufacturers rep for transportation equipment. http://www.supplyvelocity.com/files/November_2012_Sales_Process_Improvement.pdf - Our first slide shows the first step of this project, which was to create a sales performance scorecard. Prior to this, the company focused sales reps on gross profit. This scorecard, which includes measures of business development (new customers, repeat business, market share) identified the leading indicators to growth and profitability.
- Also, the nature of this company's business was that they had to order equipment in advance of the season, so they wanted to get the sales force focused on selling everything they pre-ordered (the fourth measure on the scorecard).
- Like all of our scorecards this had just a few key measures, and was therefore easy to maintain.
- Our next step was to map the current state of the sales process. We used a team that included sales reps, the V.P. of sales, customer service, accounting and supply chain.
- We mapped all steps from customer inquiry to delivering the equipment. We went all the way to delivery, because the sales reps were involved in all of these steps.
- Slide 5 shows a partial list of the non value added steps we discovered. There were 43 in all. Many of these were the sales reps doing administrative work that a back-office person could do, or the software could do automatically.
- Our goal was to make the sales force more productive. You can see on slide 6 that we made almost everyone more productive. We saved 600 hours a year in this sales process.
- This may or may not seem like a lot, but 1 year later gross profit margins increased to 8%, far above the exceed goal.
- Gross profit increased so dramatically, because the sales force had time to focus on their customers, deliver greater value and earn a return on their value-added service.
- For more information on this case study and method call or email our President, Mitch Millstein at 314-406-4962, mitch@supplyvelocity.com.
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