The Lucrum Group is often in a better position than a company’s internal teams to discover opportunities and identify social or behavioral hurdles that inhibit supply chain excellence. There are a variety of reasons for this advantage.
PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS
Situation: Many company employees have typically established a personal relationship with trading partners. Not wanting to hurt their “friends,” these relationships often restrict how open your trading partners will be in expressing their frustration or displeasure. However, those points of pain are often where you have the greatest opportunity to create value. (Ironically, the stronger the personal relationship, the less likely it is that your trading partners will tell your team members the really tough news.)
Advantage: Because we present information in aggregate and disassociate specific feedback from names of companies or individuals, subjects are typically more willing to reveal valuable information.
CUSTOMER INTEGRITY
Situation: In many cases, your customers simply won’t share with you sensitive insights or valuable details about what they perceive your competitors are doing well. This may be due to a sense of responsibility to their other suppliers or just to keep you at arms’ length. When it comes to creating manufacturing supply chain solutions that deliver value for all trading partners, these elusive insights can be very helpful in improving your efforts.
Advantage: Your customers will more often share that information with our team for one key reason—confidentiality. We assure interviewees that any information they don’t want going directly to our client will only be used in aggregate. You still gain insight, and they maintain their integrity.
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
Situation: Many well-intentioned employees will ask customers meaningful questions. Unfortunately, there often is a bias inserted, either during the questioning or when recording the answers. It’s difficult to set aside experience, pride and loyalty to really hear the unbridled truth.
Advantage: Our proven research methodology yields insights with little or no inserted bias. We combine open-ended interviews with observational information-gathering to identify needs and opportunities. This approach also gives us insight into social and behavioral challenges—critical information necessary to accelerate adoption of supply chain solutions.
INDUSTRY EXPERIENCE
Situation: A company is typically strengthened by an organization filled with people who have considerable industry experience. This is also a limiting factor, in that it’s often difficult for people to look at a situation in new or different ways. We often have clients tell us what they believe is important to their customers, only to learn from the customers that it is something else entirely.
Advantage: Our seasoned team knows business but is not steeped in any one particular industry. Consequently, we ask questions that may be overlooked or for which the answers are assumed. This insight is crucial in helping identify breakout opportunities.
Learn more about The Lucrum Group by exploring:
The Lucrum Advantage >>>