Empowered

The new Enquiry Management System (MAvEMS) DLA meeting helps commercial officers like Craig Roberts shepherd bids for new contracts through a complicated construction, pricing and approval process. In just six weeks the DLA process helped cut the number of bids that miss the customer’s submission deadline from 30 to just two.

“MAvEMS itself is a mature system,” explains Roberts. “Each day we load all the new leads and enquiries. Then the system sends the bid requirements to the various functions. After that, it’s down to us. For the bid to meet its deadline we often have to do quite a bit of progress chasing. If people don’t see the bid process as a priority, even that might not be enough. The daily DLA process makes a big difference. It keeps everyone in the picture about what we are doing and what we need to do to keep the bid on track. And if something does go wrong, it gives us a forum each morning in which we can solve the problem quickly.”

The new Shipping Dashboard and Credit Warning List tools were the fruits of a kaizen to tackle another long-standing source of frustration. Shipment delays were being caused not by production hold-ups but by eleventh-hour administrative issues. “Things would look fine right up to the last minute. You couldn’t see if there was any kind of problem with the customer until you hit the button to finalise the transaction,” says Roberts. “If you did that at 12 o’clock on a Friday at the end of month, that was it. You’d missed your delivery slot.”

Shipping Dashboard is a visual management system which uses live graphics to show the status of everything due to ship today, tomorrow and within the next seven days. “In the commercial team we can now see at a glance which units have a red flag against them, a sign that there is a problem with compliance or the contract review, which we need to tackle if the delivery is to go ahead on time.”

A similar logic—early warnings to smooth on-time delivery—lies behind Credit Warning List. “Three levels of alert—red, orange, yellow —indicate the urgency with which customer payments on account are needed if shipments are to proceed on time. Red means urgent action is needed by Commercial and Finance,” explains Roberts.

Both tools, Shipping Dashboard and Credit Warning List, are reviewed at each morning’s Level Two Commercial DLA meeting, enabling urgent issues to be referred up to Focus Factory immediately. ■

Above: Craig Roberts: DLA cut late bids from 30 on average to two in just six weeks.