Leaning Forward: Enhancing and improving the home stretch distributor/customer experience

This is an excerpt of the original article. It was written for the November 2022 edition of Supply Chain Management Review. The full article is available to current subscribers.

November 2022

Are you resilient? It’s not an idle question. If there’s one word that I’ve heard at every supply chain event I’ve attended this year, its resilience. It is, of course, in response to the last few years in supply chain management. I think its fair to say that supply chains have been knocked to the canvas more times than Rocky. What has become clear as we do our post-pandemic reviews is that the firms that demonstrated the ability to get up off the canvas and keep punching were those that invested in resiliency before the pandemic—even if they didn’t use that term.

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B2B businesses, those that we’ll define as distributors for the purposes of this article, have been focusing on developing leaner, agile and efficient operations and business processes to provide their customers with the best product and service. However, in recent years, especially with the onset of omni-channel and e-commerce, it has become more critical for B2B businesses to lean forward to speed up digital adoption in order to integrate, assimilate and share information to provide an enhanced customer experience.

Distributors have always been known for putting the customer at the heart of their businesses. Anything other than servicing the customer has always been secondary. They are continuously focused on improving sales and supply chain processes internally.

For example, distributors have aligned with manufacturers in programs that streamline the introduction of new products, including the sale of items on consignment from the manufacturer. Distributors are also innovative in their ability to provide local service (even at the customer’s worksite), push weekly or bi-weekly delivery to same or next-day delivery, use innovative methods to track items within an order to ensure accuracy and quality for the recipient and to enhance the internal and external supply chain to maximize the customer experience.

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