Cambar's Perfect Order Performance Solution

Although promising, customary Perfect Order Programs (POP) have deficiencies that limit their usefulness and full business potential. Business executives want POP to directly impact customer satisfaction, revenue, cost, profitability, and trading partner collaboration. Further, they want them to deliver improved business performance, earnings-per-share, return-on-investment, and overall business value.

Cambar Solutions is delivering far more than customary POP. Cambar Solutions has developed new thinking and devised new ways to make customary POP more compelling to business executives. Accordingly, Cambar Solutions has extended their scope and re-defined the very notion. At the same time, Cambar has overcome their current deficiencies, giving business executives what they seek. Cambar’s Perfect Order Performance Solution (CPOP) provides a compelling resource for business executives to understand, measure and manage the performance, costs, profitability and strategic alignment of their supply chain management processes; and delivers ‘perfect’ perfect order performance. With the addition of exception handling cost and profitability measures, segmentation, root cause analysis, deep data granularity, modeling and trading partner collaboration, the CPOP Solution helps clients increase customer satisfaction, reduce operating cost, increase revenue, amplify profit and overcome the challenges of collaborating with trading partners.

Cambar executes client engagements which deliver precisely targeted, high-value, high-return, customized supply chain management solutions. We call these customized supply chain management solutions, bite-sized consulting solutions. The CPOP Solution delivers substantial, supply chain know-how supported by custom-technology in an uncustomary, short timeframe at a fraction of the customary cost.

The Best Practice Consulting Component

Cambar supply chain consultants work with business executives to analyze their business strategy and develop a roadmap for better aligning operations with strategic intent. They review and develop a thorough understanding of current order management processes, business practice rules and how exceptions to standard business practices are handled. They determine and recommend which high-value strategic, differentiating and competitive order management process improvements are necessary. To expose a complete picture of trading partner profitability, Cambar supply chain consultants work with business executives to associate operating costs with the exceptions. Because CPOP supports segmentation, root cause analysis and modeling, Cambar consultants also work with business executives to classify trading partners and products into pertinent segments. They review standard metrics and propose any new metrics needed to provide a complete order performance outcome. Cambar supply chain consultants work closely with our technology consultants to ensure that the necessary detailed data is being captured and the proper information technology environment is in place. Cambar supply chain consultants help business executives determine what to do with the wealth of information gleaned from the CPOP Solution.

The Technology Innovations Component

As with all Cambar bite-sized consulting solutions, the CPOP Solution client engagement consists of a contemporary best practice consulting services component and a customized, web-accessible technology innovation component that supports, enforces and manages the new order management process improvements long after Cambar completes the engagement.

The CPOP Solution extends beyond just sales orders by encompassing support for multiple business processes including Purchase Orders, Returns, Demand Generation/Regulation (i.e. promotions, new product introductions, season management, end-of-product life), Field Service Orders and Warranty Execution processes.

CPOP identifies and tracks the necessary measurements associated with these processes to better manage trading partner relationships and performance. CPOP provides role-based views that measure performance and display metrics that are of primary interest to the specific external or internal user.

CPOP supports segmentation and visibility of data across multiple dimensions. Business executives need to see business performance over time, so Time is a key dimension. Also, they need to view performance for a specific Customer over Time. So, Customer is also a key dimension. The same is true for suppliers or carriers - and also for products.

CPOP supports weighting of key metrics to reflect their relative importance to the business or to different trading partners. Weighted metrics are an important vehicle for expressing a company’s strategic priorities.

CPOP also provides what-if modeling capabilities to see how changes in weighting or other factors impact the resulting perfect order performance scores, profitability and costs.

CPOP not only points out exceptions, but also identifies areas that are meeting or exceeding targets. Exposing high performing operational areas creates an opportunity to propagate beneficial processes across the enterprise or across trading partners.

While some businesses have developed standard performance metrics like the ones found in customary Perfect Order Programs, these metrics are summary numbers. The level of granularity supported by the CPOP Solution actually enables drill down into product and trading partner segments and even to the individual product and trading partner level.

CPOP is providing our clients with actionable data, root-cause analysis, modeling and a more complete picture of their perfect order performance condition. This in turn, enables our clients to ensure that their operations are better aligned with the intent of their business strategy.

Cambar’s Perfect Order Performance Solution Summary

The CPOP Solution includes many valuable and important business considerations that:

• Encourage better alignment of operations with business strategy;

• Provide the ability to measure the profitability of various client-defined trading partner segments across classes and products to better support improvement investment targeting;

• Expose exception handling costs and enable customized enforcement of exception management across trading partner segments;

• Provide ready-access to actionable, granular data to support root cause analysis and problem/opportunity diagnosis to exposes areas where process improvements are needed both within the company and with trading partners;

• Provide modeling capabilities via a simple management tool for better planning and execution of strategy;

• Facilitate trading partner collaboration and measure how trading partner relationships impact both customer satisfaction and business performance;

• Support weighting of key performance indicators to reflect their degree of importance to both the company and to trading partners;

• Support multiple pertinent business processes including Sales Orders, Purchase Orders, Returns, Demand Generation/Regulation, Field Service Orders and Warranty Execution processes;

• Expose beneficial processes for use as improvement templates for other less ‘perfect’ areas of the business;

• Can be implemented in a timely, cost-effective manner with a quick return-on-investment.