Streamlining front end processes to reduce cost and improve customer experience

The Challenge:

Wolf Gordon recognized the need to improve departmental processes from creation of sales orders to shipments of product to customers. There were too many hand-offs and too many hold queues (WIP). This condition caused customer delays, and some customer confusion. Internally, the lack of streamlined processes caused unnecessary costs to be built into departmental staffing. There was a lack of visibility to what was actually happening within departments and processes. Resources were under-utilized, with a lack of understanding as to what resources are actually required to effectively handle various volume levels. Unused system automation potential caused unnecessary manual processing. A lack of sufficient cross training and silo mentality restricted flexibility to process orders in a productive way. An improvement project was launched in September 2013 to address these issues in Customer Service, Outside Sales Support, Credit, IT and Warehouse.

The Results:

Changes were installed to increase productivity, order flow and responsiveness to customers. The changes successfully drove the desired cost reductions and improvement to customer service.

Overall:

• Management was provided with the tools to plan, schedule and monitor performance throughout the various departments.
• Visibility on process performance was provided to management on a daily and weekly basis by way of Management Operating Reports.
• Crewing levels set to appropriately match volume fluctuations.

Customer Service and Outside Sales Support

• Improved productivity and customer response with re-vamped phone queue system protocols, aligning resources to call volumes.
• Re-designed incoming call streams to relieve bottlenecks.
• Cross trained personnel to enable balancing of workloads.

Credit:

• Eliminated unnecessary process steps to provide faster turnaround of credit checks.
• Re-defined roles and activities to balance workload.
• Standardized process and daily timing of collection call activity.

IT:

• Daily/weekly planning of Help Desk personnel based on standard hours to volume.
• Installed a management system for project work to prioritize, plan and monitor status.

Warehouse:

• Cross trained area personnel to allow movement of resources to handle volume spikes.
• Proactive workload and hours planning to set crewing according to daily volumes.
• Increased use of system automation to improve workflow.

The Client Experience:

“Thanks to Carpedia, our attitude and perspective toward performance and process improvement has drastically changed. The measurable and sustainable contributions your team made will surely have a positive effect on our organization for years to come.”
President, Wolf Gordon Inc.