Let us start with a bit of humour, from my personal experience working within organisations. The good old, ‘chicken or the egg’ situation.
Quite often we find an imbalance between Sales and Operation key drivers that ends up affecting our clients. This is typically due to lack of information, no information or for that matter not understanding what it is that a customer need.
This is my interpretation:
Both the back-office team i.e.: Finance, IT, HR, manufacturing, warehouse, logistics, technical and the Front Office i.e.: Sales, Marketing, Branding, Imaging etc all play an integral role in meeting customer expectations. The common saying: ‘Garbage in, garbage out’, what we interpret clients needs to be must be succinct, clear, before it’s passed on the back office teams (and vice versa) to execute otherwise for sure we will have an imbalance.
Interpret, Analyse your Environment
Back to the Chicken and Egg scenario. In your immediate environment. We must understand the role each other plays. The one, cannot exist with the other. Please don’t try to uncover this one on your own?, close supervision is needed.
They both together creates a mutually beneficial relationship to execute on activities for a Customer.
In this Blog let us put some food for thought into our journey of creating a resilient and sustainable supply chain.
- Does Sales understand the back office, does back office understand the front office?
- The environment we work in: are the chickens fed proper food, food that is good for the chicken and for that matter good for human consumption and health?
- Is the environment for the chickens we breed, having a good quality of land? Land that is suitable, room to run around etc?
- We want to produce good quality eggs, Right? Every once in while a Golden egg:)
- In a Supply Chain setup, we need the right balance between customer demand and operational activities. This is all about planning. Garbage in, garbage out!
Ok, enough said. Above is just throwing food for thought. Or should I say food for the chickens?
