Pricing games: A technology company boast

Pricing games: A technology company boastSurface Transport & Logistics

For one leading pharmaceutical laboratory, success and double-digit sales growth came with a cost: an overburdened supply chain that threatened to reduce market share.

The effort vastly improved the company’s planning and execution functions, they knew that in order to succeed in this era of technology their accounting systems needed to be much more robust than what they are. They turned to WP consulting to improve their accounting systems.

challenge

The biggest challenge was that Arguzo was not utilizing technology properly. Too much of the work was still being recorded manually, which meant that the numbers took a long time to note down and then to be analyzed. Live data was also not available and decisions can only be made after all the required data and been received. This was holding Arguzo back; they knew they could corner more of the market if they had the ability to be more mobile. The work addressed three critical issues for Pharm Ltd.:

Improve sales and operations and production planning:

The teams focused their efforts on a few of the highest-value S&OP levers in order to review the current planning process, identify gaps in the planning infrastructure and analytically understand demand and supply variability.
Determine the right inventory level:

With hundreds of medications in the market, Pharm Ltd. needed a proper method to predict and manage their inventory. Using a mean absolute percentage analysis (MAPE), the teams defined appropriate levels for raw materials and finished products by mapping actual versus forecasted sales on the most important SKUs.
Optimize the supply chain for perfect order planning:

The diagnostic determined the stressors that affected sales and service levels. The teams focused on resolving issues related to higher-than-normal back-orders and lead times, which stressed the entire supply chain and led to delays in medications reaching consumers.

solution

The solution WP consulting came up with combined cutting edge technology with real world practicality. Everyone knew that the systems had to be updated, the real challenge was updating them without disrupting the whole organization in a negative way. The solution was to introduce proper workload management done through computers, while providing mobile platforms to the stakeholders.

This allowed the workers to be involved in the job instead of feeling like they had been made redundant by technology.

results

Arguzo employees are now more empowered; Arguzo also has the benefit of generating reports instantaneously whenever needed. They can now make decisions on the fly based on the latest real time data.

The effort vastly improved the company’s planning and execution functions, created and implemented a new stock policy that accounted for specific SKUs and key variables, streamlined the order preparation process and reduced distribution transport times.

By the numbers, the effort:

Reduced lead time by 43%
Decreased variability by 50%
Lowered the risk of back-order by 95%
Increased stock for finished goods by 10%

“What gets measured gets corrected!”

Back in the day when Six Sigma (Place link here.) was all the rage and I hung around with its adherents, I heard that expression a lot.

I mean really a lot!

Now, while I thought that many times the whole Six Sigma fad was a bot overdone, there were some gems that I took away.

“What gets measured gets corrected!” was one of them.

Often times in social media, we forget to measure.

Or, we measure the wrong things.

One of my favorite topics, time, when talking about metrics is often overlooked.

This leads to the frustration and disappointment with social media that many organizations, especially small and medium sized businesses, feel.

Large organizations have different needs and tools available, not to mention better funding, available when thinking about social media metrics.

Small and medium sized businesses don’t have to start on that scale or ever even reach it.

Sometimes, even Google Analytics can be overkill for them initially.

Keeping things simple, particularly at the start, is a great idea for small and medium sized businesses when starting with social media metrics.

Excel will often take care of basic needs involving social media metrics long before a more involved solution is required.

Let’s talk something, I just mentioned, namely time.

(Don’t worry this won’t become a physics lesson!)

Time is a continuum.

There’s yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

What did we look like yesterday compared to today and where do we want to go tomorrow?

Thinking about this helps us with our social media program.

It helps us to understand the processes we need to put into place.

It helps us to answer some key questions.

What data do we need in order to know if we’re accomplishing our goals?

How will we collect this data and where will be put it? (Hint, we need a better answer than a thumb drive.)

What actions will we take once we have this data and have analyzed it?

Get the picture?

(That’s not one of the key questions!)

The goal here is to have a data driven social media program.

We need to get down to the lowest possible, actionable task and measure it. (Another hint, saying we want to increase revenues is not a good enough goal by itself.)

Once we measure something then we can start doing something about it!

That’s it for now!

In the meantime, thank you for following and reading my blog!

I look forward to any and all comments that you may have. I will reply to any comments made to this blog post as promptly as I can.

Remember!

I do this for a living and if I can be of any assistance to either you or your organization, please feel free to call on me. Our initial discussion will be of no charge to you.

I can also be reached at conpsweeney@someddi.com.

My Twitter handle is @conpsweeney.

Stay well!

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