Customer Responsiveness

Much of what we discovered along the way to becoming a true Quick Response company has a close tie-in to the course material for the APICS CIRM (Certified in Integrated Resource Manage­ment) program. It is particularly pertinent to the CIRM capstone module, Integrated Enterprise Management.

Our QR Project team had to become well versed in the functional areas of the enterprise, their interrelationships and how to inte­grate them well; teamwork skills; accomplishing (facilitating) change; making strategic decisions and implementing business plans consistent with the vision and mission of the enterprise; competitive and stakeholder influences; and the transition of the enterprise through time. All of these are covered in the resource/study materials for the final CIRM exam on Integrated Enterprise Management. These materials were very helpful in guiding our efforts. I would strongly recommend investigation of the CIRM courseware to anyone who is facing the same kind of challenges and decisions we were.

The first positive feedback that we had from our customers about their appreciation for our Quick Response program came in face-to-face meetings our project team scheduled with several customers. These meetings were organized as focus group ses­sions primarily to solicit these customers' views on Quick Response and to obtain their plans and thoughts on their future QR requirements. However, a major benefit from each of these meetings was the very positive reaction (delight) to our dedication to true Quick Response service.

Even the executives from very large, industry-leader companies expressed their admiration and their appreciation for our program. This itself was worth the price of admission to us. And we did find these customers, without exception, to be cooperative and open in their exchange of information on plans and schedules for extensions to their service requirements. One major customer, who had viewed Ames as perhaps too small to sustain the level of service they required for the volume of business they projected, did a complete turnaround after hearing of our QR plans. They have subsequently included us in the very small circle of trusted advisor vendors asked to help them formulate future QR plans.

Such initial delight is, of course, only good so long as you are able to follow-through with consistent QR results. Unless we are able to sustain the level of Quick Response service and continue to meet their requirements we will lose the power to delight, and may well lose them as customers.

Therefore it is vital for us, and any manufacturing company that embarks on a QR program, to follow-through to its successful completion. That means preparing your organization to meet each and every one of the Quick Response objectives (Table 1), putting it all together with your own company's goals and objectives, implementing the sweeping changes required throughout the organization, and continuing the change process in continuous improvement mode as a standard mode of operation.

We learned that QR cannot be implemented partially, by selecting the subset of operations and business practices that you feel are comfortable for you to change. It cannot be done as a part-time project, either—it requires a significant amount of the time of several key people (who are over-loaded to start with) and the full-time of at least one person to be Project Manager. It also cannot be done without the full support of top management, including unequivocal commitment of the resources that will be required (dollars, people and time) and recognition that other pet projects will be shunted aside.

We also learned, however, that the results of true Quick Response performance are truly delightful, both for our customers and ourselves. We are still working toward the full implementation of all business practice, operational and information systems changes required to reach the level of QR capability we set as our original goals. We also keep discovering, as we uncover rocks in our operations, more changes and improvements that will be required. And we expect to continue to discover more and more of these, to keep us in continuous improvement mode for the

foreseeable future. But we definitely see the internal benefits and growing customer service performance improvements that make it all worthwhile.

Becoming a true Quick Response company is not easy, and it's not a short-term project. It requires dedication and a real desire to delight your customers. Achieving Quick Response status and continuing to challenge yourself to push your QR capabilities further and further is definitely well worth the effort, however. If you delight your customers by exceeding their expectations, you should also be able to delight yourselves by exceeding your sales and profit expectations.

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