How many times does your sales team say "tell the driver its cancelled when he arrives" ? Its a simple enough statement, in isolation not causing any impact, yet it does have an impact onto the bottom line profitability of your business and here is why.
I've been doing some work for a company recently, they manufacture and distribute plumbing supplies across the UK. Its quite a significant operation but you can feel straight away that there is a depressed feeling of morale and its not long before the familiar comments of "no one listens to me | no one cares | whats the point of saying anything" bubble up to the surface.
Against that, there are a number of people who you can see are ready to leap forward with new ideas, new ways to get the work done, the spark of enthusiasm is there and its important it doesn't get put out by the "we've always done it this way" brigade.
Out with a vehicle one day and we arrived at a premises to do a delivery, "its been cancelled" said the customer, "I was told to tell you when you got here, cancelled it yesterday". Driver is needless to say not pleased, he now has to work around this delivery for the rest of the day and as far as he's concerned he's just waisted and hour.
The response from the transport manager was, "happens all the time" and that was the end of it.
Its isn't though. When the process was looked at in greater depth, this one act (and there are a few every day) cost the company a significant amount of money, by an estimate it works like this
Sales team - 10 minutes to process the order
Warehouse Team - 15 minutes to pick, pack and collate the order (remember this isn't a couple of grams)
Loaders - 10 minutes
Schedulers - 5 minutes
Driver - 60 minutes (in this case the average time between drops is 30 minutes)
Driver - 10 minutes to offload at depot and return paperwork
Warehouse - 20 minutes to book it back into stock, check for damages and place it back in location
There is more time but then add in around an hour of vehicle time and costs, the environmental footprint and the additional road risk created by this one act and suddenly "tell the driver" has become a powerful negative cost to your business.
Having the right process in place saves your business unnecessary risk, time, effort and of course will impact on your bottom line.
If anything in this article has struck a chord with you then pick the phone up, give me a call and lets have a chat about how I may be able to help you. +447964
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