How You Deliver is Going to Impact How We Live

These days, your supply chain provider can deliver your customers a set of winter tires overnight. It's going to cost them $175 more, cost the environment the carbon footprint of a jet, along with air and noise pollution, all for something they won't need for another six months.

Conversely, you could also arrange to get your customers a hot water pump in the next five days. It's going to cost relatively little and do minimal damage to the planet, but they'll have to suffer through several days of cold showers and dirty dishes.

Does Speed Equal Value?

I grant you these are extreme, black-and-white examples, but at Visible Supply Chain Management, as an integrated technology-driven supply chain company, we're thinking about these scenarios for your customers with many shades of grey. We see a big part—perhaps the biggest part—of our job is helping you to deliver a supply chain solution that speaks to what your customers actually want and need while improving competitive advantage in your space—and we want you to do all this while not breaking the brand equity you have earned with customers, or the bank, or the planet.

Today, a lot of technology is focused on speed of delivery. It's getting faster all the time. Pretty soon you'll be able to deliver an extra-large, hold-the-mushrooms pizza, by drone, in 20 minutes, or it's free. Delicious. But just because you can, should you?

What Do Your Customers Actually Want?

While many eCommerce companies, such as the Amazons of the world, are fixated on time to customer, we know that other questions are just as important and worth contemplating. Questions such as value to customer, and cost to planet. And, when it makes sense, we're happy to recommend slower delivery methods. What's more, you may find you are happy to consider them, because your customers are happier still to accept them.

Fact is, some things should stay on the ground, particularly when the urgent ones can still get there in a two-day window.

Shipping everything by air isn't just detrimental to the environment, it's an insult to your customers' business know-how. It's time your SCM partner puts as much thought into how the box gets there, and how quickly, as you do into what goes inside it. You may find that giving customers the option to reduce their costs and personal environmental impact will garner repeat business and higher purchase points. You might also be surprised by the result of providing them with the choice, particularly among younger customers, who are voting with their dollars and loyalty for products with less impact.

Today, More Choices Equal More Competitive Advantage

Working with an SCM partner who provides options on more than just speed opens up a whole new world of choices for your customers. How much do they want to spend? How quickly do they need it? And what do they want their decision to do to our environment and economy? It empowers buyers to make better decisions that are representative of them not just as “consumers,” but as people.

The factor of choice is a critical part of the supply chain that doesn't always receive the attention it deserves. Everyone has become fixated on “how fast can we go… is immediately soon enough?” believing that this mindset is the only way to compete against Amazon and its cohorts.

You may find that offering the choice of how, and when, the box gets there is a massive competitive advantage, so demand that the SCM partner you work with offers options.

If enlightened businesses like yours are giving more thought to what goes in the box, and how big that box is, shouldn't your supply chain partner cater to your organization's values and customers' expectations? You have already discovered that right-sizing packages, diminishing print processes, and examining fill can protect products better, make production cheaper, diminish environmental impact, and move shipments into a more economical shipping rate bracket. A win-win-win-win. With an all-important additional win among those customers who are increasingly taking notice of unnecessary packaging waste—it's space in the landfill, and the cost, energy, and pollution required to get it there.

What people really want is the ability to tailor their experiences for themselves. And that doesn't necessarily include getting products as fast as humanly, or technologically, possible.

It’s Bigger Than Supply Chains

When the present is filled with options, the future isn't filled with pollution, garbage, and inflated prices.

What the world needs now are choices that allow us to run profitable businesses while giving customers what they want, making it a no-brainer for them to choose you over competitors who do not prioritize the right things. But, rest assured, Visible Supply Chain Management is working on identifying areas where you can win market share and making sure you are partnered with the right SCM company who is up for the challenge.

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