Thanks Mark, very inspirational. It would be awesome if the distribution industry can catch fire in the way you describe. I think it comes down to incremental wins. The delivery notification thing caught fire in our world. Nobody asked for it but customers love it. I have advocated more along the lines of understanding the whereabouts of items and our customers need, but maybe that's not sexy enough. If we can give our customers real time tracking of their back orders, before they hit the road, it will be received just as well imo. Of course this would mean a lot of work for our vendors and the revealing of their internal weaknesses in ship date management. But I maintain that rough date estimation and then changing the dates all the time as more becomes clear are better than no dates. And in my world the concern is mainly special order stuff, not run of the mill items. Happy New Year !
Thanks Mark, very inspirational. It would be awesome if the distribution industry can catch fire in the way you describe. I think it comes down to incremental wins. The delivery notification thing caught fire in our world. Nobody asked for it but customers love it. I have advocated more along the lines of understanding the whereabouts of items and our customers need, but maybe that's not sexy enough. If we can give our customers real time tracking of their back orders, before they hit the road, it will be received just as well imo. Of course this would mean a lot of work for our vendors and the revealing of their internal weaknesses in ship date management. But I maintain that rough date estimation and then changing the dates all the time as more becomes clear are better than no dates. And in my world the concern is mainly special order stuff, not run of the mill items. Happy New Year !