Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays
May the lights shine brightly all year long. We wish you the very best.
The vLinx Team
Chicken Little – Say it Isn’t So!
On the night of the first full Winter Solstice Lunar Eclipse (http://tinyurl.com/2fu7a7x) – the doomsday predictors and naysayers are out in full force. If I were to believe them – then quite simply the world is coming to an end tonight and it doesn’t much matter what 2011 has in store for us!
Thankfully, I haven’t drunk the crazy Kool-Aid and I believe that there will be a tomorrow (sorry if I have alienated any readers but then again you will only be upset for another couple of hours!) However as a result of the conversations, I did spend my morning commute reflecting on 2010 and how this past year will shape 2011.
The Ultimate High – 17 days of spectacular emotion, human stories and amazing sporting achievements at the Winter Olympics in Vancouver (our home town). If only we could have bottled and sold the spirit of the games…it was addictively fun!
Clouds Have Rolled In – For most cloud coverage is not what you want but for web-based software companies, the emerging understanding of cloud computing is a breath of fresh air. Businesses see the value and trust has been established. It will be nice not to have to start every presentation with the definition of nimbus and cumulus formations.
Hip Hip Hooray – My shout out to the internal and external teams that I am fortunate to be engaged with. Once again, our customers challenged vLinx this year to continue to develop and improve our offerings and our team rose to the challenge. I am grateful for the amazing people that make my job extraordinarily fun and rewarding.
So while I am sleeping and the earth is directly between the sun and the moon and casting it’s shadow I will be happily dreaming about the upcoming year (maybe George Clooney as well!) It seems to me that stars have aligned and 2011 looks like a year of great opportunity.
Ditch the Email – Embrace Potential
The horror stories continue – lead in children’s jewelry, contaminated food, recalled products due to safety concerns – it makes you question your sourcing processes. Even more frightening is that lingering thought…could it happen to us? In an age that demands the right product at the right price…now…we must continue to explore and seize opportunities where they arise and not allow the lurking hazards to limit the potential.
However, as participants in the business of sourcing – be it from around the corner or around the world – we know the act itself demands trust, patience, process and partnerships in order to be successful. Challenging one’s own sense of emotional control is fortunately or unfortunately (depending on perspective) entirely in the personal domain of responsibility and control. See the infinite list of self-help sites available!
But the process and partnerships we choose to support our sourcing efforts are entirely within our bailiwick. To effectively source and mitigate the risks that are innately bred within the practice of buying and sourcing, the process that we adhere to must provide visibility, information flow throughout the cycle, engage all participants and continuously provide controls to ensure business continuity.
It must be recognized that sourcing is not just the physical flow and movement of the products. It is much more and for leading retail organizations, they have recognized it encompasses the complete cycle – from the request for information through to the delivery of the products. When businesses ignore the importance of the initial processes, they exponentially increase administrative costs and escalate the challenges faced by their internal teams and external partners.
Sourcing software provides tools, workflow and process management that eliminates many of the inefficient and cumbersome hurdles in the sourcing process. Please don’t confuse Excel and email as software – or even as good tools to use in this process! To achieve best-in-class results, eliminate costs and ultimately deliver a stellar customer experience, support your personnel with a sourcing process and platform.
Toast: The Service Malcontent
It started out innocently enough; at lunch the other day I asked for my sandwich to be toasted. For some I know this is sacrilegious. Maligning the soft yeasty bread; creating a hard and crunchy apparition only to be wolfed down between swigs of diet coke and carrots. But on that day, I was craving for a warm and toasty sandwich.
I didn’t foresee this to be a challenging request. I seemed to have everything under control: I was at a deli counter, they sold sandwiches and I was speaking in a language both of us understood. And yet, when I made this simple request – “toasted please” – it stopped all conversation and I was told NO.
Taken aback, I asked my server once again if I could have my sandwich toasted. I am Canadian, polite by birth and I thought maybe she just misunderstood. She repeated her no and added that the owner of the shop had removed all of the toasters from the DELI because toasting slowed down their productivity. Hmph!
In a world where faster is better. Download times are measured. Calls are monitored and expectations continue to rise; I find the juxtaposition of speed of service versus delivering customer value to be quite erroneous. I don’t think that my values differ from the average consumer: I want what I want, when I want it, at a fair value. I wanted toasted and obviously I was willing to wait for it.
My toast fiasco got me thinking about the service and businesses that I admire – that delight and exceed my expectations. The call centers, Customer Support teams and front line personnel that handle direct customer issues with honesty, aplomb, integrity and frankness and ultimately the untold revenue they deliver to an organization. I have been asked if we should make our Customer Service department into a profit center (versus how the accountants look at it now!) and tell them…It already is!
At vLinx we don’t ask our CS team to limit their call time with a customer. We don’t script our calls and place pressure on how long they can talk to a client or what they can say. We trust our people. We allow them to build a relationship. We want them to engage. I want them to enjoy solving the challenge our customer is facing. And above all, I want our customers to enjoy dealing with us – in what ever way they want and when ever they want. If one client needs something one way and another in a different form, then it is our job to make that happen. Deliver their needs, when they want it!
I see it everyday, the service and the drive to meet the client’s needs delivers clients that are engaged and delighted with vLinx…and a happy client produces revenue! An important lesson the deli owner should learn.
I failed to mention, I left the deli without spending a dime and I have not been back since as low and behold, I found a great little shop that will happily toast my bread and sell me the product that I want!
Where in the world?
Evolution is a funny thing. The growth, development and change – starting as one entity and ending up as another or as Webster’s would define it: “a process of continuous change from lower, simpler, or worse to a higher, more complex, or better state”. Throughout our lives we have all experienced this phenomenon, with the pace accelerating exponentially. Basic interactions and everyday things have radically changed in a very short time – think about how we communicate; remember a time you didn’t have a cell phone? SMS? Facebook? When you used more than 140 characters to express your thoughts!
When I think about how our world has been shrinking and our business practices are subject to the same forces of evolution, I wonder whether it will bring us to the zenith that we are all chasing. Product development and sourcing has continually evolved. There was a time that Made in America was the only choice for our manufacturing selection. But now, the de facto global manufacturing base is China, where low costs lured us in. And we were caught hook, line and sinker.
Chinese manufacturers are now facing the forces of evolution and as sourcing expert, Mr. Bruce Rockowitz of Li & Fung said “What you are moving into is an era for higher prices… the effect was the natural evolution of a country developing and a part of a greater movement of prices going up…” http://www.supplychain.cn/en/art/3732/ This evolution will begin to test the bonds between buyers and suppliers; someone will be on the hook for the higher costs. It is reminiscent of the Japan – Taiwan – China sourcing evolution that brought us to where we are today.
So where to next? Are there countries and manufacturing havens that can support the demands of the global consumer, that have the infrastructure to deliver but at an even lower cost? Can India support a cultural renaissance that will allow the country to reach its manufacturing potential? Is Vietnam the next manufacturing Mecca? It appears evident that there is a shift happening. China remains in the top 5 countries when reviewing the global GDP Growth Rates by country but closing in are India, Bangladesh and Vietnam. China won’t disappear but by all indications, manufacturing centers will continue to develop in burgeoning countries and pressure the traditional buying patterns. [source]
Mired in amongst these strategic issues is the cost of all of this change. I am not simply talking about the raw production costs, but more so the human price we pay. The churn that we create. The wake of turmoil we leave as we move our infrastructure to the next great manufacturing haven. Is the pressure we exert – as consumers, retail buyers, distributors, suppliers – sustainable? Consumers are reticent to accept higher costs. Retailers are focused on cutting costs and manufacturers are experiencing higher costs. I believe this is what is called a rock and a hard place.
Change is ultimately healthy and evolution strengthens our world. The pace at which we move through the development planes is what simply amazes me. I am intrigued to watch as countries vie for the fickle and elusive global consumer. Some will win, while other nations will lose and all told it will be a different landscape when we look back in another 10 years.
