Sosourceurce -Staple Yourself to an order
sourseAasouSSSSSourse -  Staple Yourself to an order
          by Benson P .Shapiro,V.Kasturi Rangan,and John J.Svioka
                     Harward Business Review
                                     (July-August ,1992)
 

                     The author of the article have a point that it is easy to talk about customer satisfaction but the steps such as empowerment of the front line workers and talk about customer orientation at each step is not going to work until proper attention is  given to the order management  cycle (OMC). According to them every employee in the company who affect order management process is the equivalent of a front line worker.

                                 According to them manager can establish and achieve aggressive goals such as "improve customer fill rate from 80-98% "or "cut order to cycle time by 25%" by just concentrating at the order management cycle.

          The order management cycle involves following steps
            1. order planning , sales forecasting and capacity planning
              2. order generation
              3. cost estimation and pricing
              4. order receipt and entry
              5. order selection and prioritization
              6. scheduling
              7. fulfillment , procurement, manufacturing , assembling , testing, shipping ,installation
              8. billing
              9. returns and claims
            10. post sales service

                                          They explains that a customer's unattended order is same as unattended customer .
                          The reasons for unattended customer order or improper attention on  customer order is  due to following gaps between different stages of the process or the department.

                                  order planning -  Note that the people farthest from the customer makes the crucial decisions and may open up deep disagreement between the interdependent functions staring from the beginning.
                                sales forecasting-sales forecast is developed by the sales forces or the marketing people but is often production people (usually farthest from the people) feel it as unrealistic and they draw the final forecast of their own to hire worker and build inventory.
                                  order generation- the sales people or marketing people generates order but little coordination takes place across functional boundaries.
                                  cost estimation and pricing -   here battle starts between the engineers who estimates the cost ,accountants who calculates the cost, headquarters group that oversees pricing  and field sales people that actually develops a price.each group questions the the competence , judgement and ability of the others.
                                  Order rceipt and entry - here the front line people are usually unaware of the strategy of the top management and usually they give equal attention on each order which is incorrect strategy (   detail ).
                               scheduling - here the conflicting goal of different departments come into the picture. Marketing and sales people argue for special service for each customer but the production people seek to mininmize the equipment changeover.
                                 fulfillment process-   the complication of the process require more coordination across the organisation and so their exist greater chance for the physical gap.
                                 Billing - often bills are prepared in a manner that is convenient to the billing department than for the customer and customer  usually feel it is incorrect.

                                        Due to all these four problem appears in the
                                                       1. no one in the organization  understand the whole organization ; and it leads to serious conflict between different departments.
                                                        2. as most of the function require overlapping functional responsibilities their exist greater chance of mishandling of order when it passes from one department to other.
                                                        3. to the top management the details of order management cycle are invisible.
                                                        4. the customer is as distant from the management as the management is from the OMC (order management cycle).

                                    The author suggest following step to improve the customer satisfaction
                     1. Analysis of the OMC - and chart the gaps
                                                              if the company analyses its order management cycle and show visual charts ( for ease of employee) to every employee in the department ; the employee understand the organization process better and it leads to better co-operation between the departments and the overall customer orientation  of the organization improve drastically.
                        2. system focus-
                                          the organization should design the performance measurement which includes measures such as performance across the boundary or through out the system so that
the cooperation across the boundary can increase.
                 3.political strategy- (staple yourself to order management cycle)
                                        by giving proper attention on order management cycle Top management  can increase the understanding of the organization and then the decision taken by the top management will be very near to the people and it will certainly have much better probability of success.