Improving Company Profitability in 5 Steps – Improving Service Delivery

Nov 27, 2018 Improving Company Profitability in 5 Steps – Improving Service Delivery

Step 4 – Improving Product and Service Delivery

How are you at delivering your service or building your product?  How do you maintain quality?  Do you have a lot of defects?  Do you even know?  Do you have a lot of service do-overs or returns?  Do you consistently deliver your product or service when you promised?  If not, why not?

Wow, that is lot of questions and each is important.  Keep in mind that a problem may have many related issues.  They can range from poor quality control, ineffective production scheduling, inaccurate estimating, the lack of systems to provide transparency into operations, inefficient work flows, etc.

To be successfully, you need to deliver your product or service, with the quality your customers expect, in the time frame they expect/you promised.  If you don’t track the basics like the time from order to shipment, the number of returns, the reasons for returns, the percentage of orders where you do not have inventory for immediate shipment, etc. you have no objective metrics to answer the question.  Figure out what metrics you need to be tracking and go about tracking them.  Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and think about the things they are concerned with, not the things you might think you want to measure.  This is a time of rising customer expectations and you need to rise to meet their expectations.

Bryan B Mason

Apollo Consulting Group, Newport, RI