I’ve heard this analogy before around here but heard it again today so I thought I would share it. It has to do with changing dynamics in customer expectations and what it means to brand owner and manufacturers.

Customers that take the bus essentially buy what you make available to them. That’s because a bus runs at a regular schedule and customers must align their needs with the service provided. Businesses that have such customers tend to optimize their resources for expected events and build expertise around execution with limited flexibility.

Increasingly, however, I’m seeing that customers want to take a cab. Customers that want to take a cab expect to buy what they want when they want it. As such, businesses that serve these customers need to optimize the usage of their resources around actual events. In addition, they need to be highly flexible with a goal to respond and then execute consistent with the needs of that changing condition.

If your customers expect a cab, what are you doing to ensure your supply network is optimized for your customers’ expectations? Have you built responsiveness directly into the core of your business and into your supply chain management processes? What are the implications of not doing so if that’s what your customers expect?

I find so many companies have been driven by the long-standing metrics associated with running your business like clockwork (which works well if your customers expect to ride a bus) that they struggle to deal with the business when it doesn’t run like clockwork (your customers want a cab now!). And more and more customers are opting for the cab.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 20th, 2007 at 4:23 pm and is filed under General News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.