Service Leadership Roundtable

Building a Smarter Supply Chain for the Future

There is a clear need to drive innovation into best-class organisations proving to top tier management and directors, that there is a need to change intrinsically throughout every aspect of the organisation. Indeed the future Supply Chain will be Smarter, will positively impact cost reduction, add value and improve bottom line results.

In order to recognise the power of the supply chain, our research will demonstrate;
- The importance of collaboration and risk reduction
- Why investment in technology will enable visibility across the supply chain
- The need to link KPI’s to increasing customer demands
The research will help further define the challenges in moving towards globalisation in your supply chain.

Companies starting a Service Transformation often encounter Process and IT issues such as how to balance standardisation without being monolithic, how to effectively redesign processes and implement them in systems, and how to avoid a disruptive big- bang approach, as well as many other challenges.

Too often we see organisations giving too much emphasis on:

• Incremental improvements of issues raised from delivery execution
• Benchmarking of operational KPI’s
• Copying best practices from (industry) peers which are not on best practice level
• Fixing issues or cutting cost without improving capabilities and processes

Where do you start? - How do you define the correct priorities for operational excellence?
Build a strategic business case that will win you executive commitment?
Deliver short term and midterm impact?
Ensure that measures result in sustainable improvements?

The upcoming Operational Excellence virtual roundtable is a forum where successful companies will exchange experiences and share best practices around these and other popular challenges.

Businesses with past success built upon the quality and innovation of their products may falter if their concept of service (repair break/fix) is only as a support to the manufacturing operation. However if the quality and innovation of product is supported by a similar level of quality and innovation in service, this can provide an excellent way to build and sustain long-term relationships.  Retaining customers means that a reputation has to be sustained over an extended period, and the service aspect of the relationship can provide a bridge should there be a problem with a faulty product. If the concept of service has evolved simply from one of reducing the cost of manufacturing errors, and does not focus on the optimum value derived by the customer from the application of the product, the relationship may not be sufficiently robust to resist a stress. This is best illustrated in figure 1, which shows the effort required to build satisfaction in a product into long-term loyalty. Unless satisfaction and loyalty are high, the value of a customer as a promoter is minimal, but promotion by a customer will have immense value.

Service Economics is not intended as a buzz phrase it is an attempt to explain service in terms that the Board will fully align with and recognise as valuable. The aim of our research and the topic of the "Executive Summit -Service Economics" is to develop further understanding and develop the new economic rule book to play by when defining a sustainable service strategy and running a successful service business.

Building a Smarter Supply Chain for the Future

There is a clear need to drive innovation into best-class organisations proving to top tier management and directors, that there is a need to change intrinsically throughout every aspect of the organisation. Indeed the future Supply Chain will be Smarter, will positively impact cost reduction, add value and improve bottom line results.

In order to recognise the power of the supply chain, our research will demonstrate;
- The importance of collaboration and risk reduction
- Why investment in technology will enable visibility across the supply chain
- The need to link KPI’s to increasing customer demands
The research will help further define the challenges in moving towards globalisation in your supply chain.

Companies starting a Service Transformation often encounter Process and IT issues such as how to balance standardisation without being monolithic, how to effectively redesign processes and implement them in systems, and how to avoid a disruptive big- bang approach, as well as many other challenges.

Are your customers experiencing the value?

This roundtable aims to discuss Customer Experience management, service marketing and service marketing research methods, including and service pricing.

Our worldwide research program has provided new insights into what the most successful Service Strategies are and how these strategies should be implemented. One of the most successful strategies is the Brand Driven Strategy in which the brand reflects the value that customers should expect. Companies like Miele, Philips Healthcare, Crawford are examples of this successful strategy.

During the roundtable, we will focus on the following themes:
• Which factors are typically valued and perceived by your customers as strategic differentiators?
• How can you better manage the valuable elements in the brand and deliver the desired customer experience?
• How to deliver the value in a more cost effective manner?