Companies live and die by the experiences they deliver.
Consider for a minute those companies you admire the most and least, and the dividing line will most likely be the expectations they create and experiences they deliver. The more complex the company, the exponentially more difficult it becomes to orchestrate a myriad of systems, processes and people to deliver exceptional performance.
To achieve this level of performance – so quantifiable from a financial performance standpoint and most important, so memorable for a customer one – these companies take deliberate steps to transform their businesses daily. They are each on a journey of transformation that delivers solid, reliable results to customers every day. I’ve visited Boeing, Cubic, General Dynamics, IBM, Northrup-Grumman, Microsoft, Raytheon, Siemens and others. From those visits a series of useful insights emerge:
- Perfect Order performance is indexed to customer satisfaction scores not just in sales and marketing, but all the way to the supplier level. This is a core building block of transforming complexity into customer-centric strategies. The bad complexity of no accountability, no ownership goes away fast when each member of a supply chain knows their role in customer satisfaction. My article, The Perfect Order Meets Customer Expectations, explains how to use the Perfect Order Index and its implications on customer satisfaction.
- There is an Accelerator Effect that happens with Perfect Order performance tied to customer satisfaction. The median level of Perfect Order performance is in many companies hovers in the 70 percent range – a formidable accomplishment given how diverse supply chain, manufacturing, logistics and fulfillment processes and systems are. But when one factors in the metrics of customer satisfaction, as Microsoft has done on specific programs, the metric can gain between five percent to 10 percent more traction. Integrating customer satisfaction to Perfect Order performance transforms internal processes and makes them more agile, fluid, and capable of responding to market conditions.
- Striving for Perfect Order performance enables a company to transform the best types of complexity they have into profitable growth – all fueled by getting in the habit of exceeding customers’ expectations. In visiting the best-performing aerospace, discrete and high tech companies, it was impressive to see how they are transforming the complexity of the following manufacturing strategies, making them more customer-centric and customer-driven not just with internal metrics, but with customer satisfaction scores:
- Engineer-to-order workflows at Boeing and its Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul (MRO) provider Parker Hannifin are now benchmarked by contract compliance and customer satisfaction scores, including ratings of Perfect Order and customer satisfaction levels attained.
- Siemens Electric, a Cincom customer, is successfully using configure-to-order workflows to automate 500 inbound quotes and proposals a month, delivering Perfect Order Performance above 70 percent at the same time.
- Galvanizing build-to-order workflows around a single view of the customer at Omnicell has resulted in a 67 percent reduction in rework, all predicated on unifying Perfect Order Performance and customer satisfaction.
- Microsoft’s vision of the future of manufacturing shows what’s possible when Perfect Order performance and customer satisfaction are unified, and the customer experience becomes the most important priority. This video is inspiring in its use of customer feedback, Perfect Order performance and what’s possible when a company decides to transform its thinking and strategies for the better:
Bottom line: Transforming your company starts with the decision to become demand driven, moving beyond purely internal metrics to embrace customer insights and intelligence. Transforming complex enterprises into dynamic businesses is the mission Cincom is on. We’ll report back what we find on our journey on this blog, thanks for reading.
