Delivery reliability – a sustainable success factor

Companies producing and processing commodities are often faced with overcapacities in their own market. Remaining competitive in such an environment means to maintain or sustainably strengthen competitive edges. Price, quality and customer service are the crucial factors in this regard.

In addition to competitive prices and quality, consistent customer service is essential to secure long-term and economically successful customer relations.

Delivery times are often considered one of the main criteria for successful customer service, delivery reliability, however, is often neglected. It is, however, not the actual duration, i.e., the period up to the delivery, but the timely compliance with the promised delivery date that counts. This reliability is key and an important success factor for the supplier from the customer’s perspective. In just-in-time production, delivery reliability is even crucial. A prerequisite for this are robust and predictable business processes.

The flexibility demanded of producing companies often clashes with the required delivery reliability.

In this context, the reasons for a lack of delivery reliability are often rooted in the missing, incorrect or simply insufficient exchange of information between one’s own business processes and also with the customer.

Examples:

• the lack of communication between the commitments made in sales and the actual possibilities and capacities in production,
• considering unforeseen production orders and associated rescheduling,
• or even non-performance within the supply chain (e.g., non-performance of one’s own supplier)

to name but a few significant influences.

What can IT departments provide in this context? IT departments of producing companies must enable and support the required flexibility of processes more than ever.

Examples of this are:

• Documented status management and release processes from offer preparation to delivery à lead to cross-process transparency of job-related data and workflow-controlled processes.
• Planning control panel including system-generated recommendations (business intelligence) à leads to a preview of future demand while taking into account specific customer metrics (e.g., sales volumes, batch sizes, customer profitability).

Innovative software solutions combined with the new possibilities of a digital transformation of business processes and in-depth process understanding build the basis of future-oriented IT strategies. COSMO CONSULT and Microsoft peruse these objectives together with their customers.