And once we shut up….

I caught myself ignoring my own advice just before Christmas. We’ve been helping a client improve their handling of customer support calls. This lead us to look at their stock management system, which we quickly found was not set up to help them achieve what they needed to achieve i.e. avoid stock outs of key maintenance parts without tying up huge amounts of capital in unnecessary stock. I guess living a blinkered life I’d figured that poorly set up systems were the exclusive domain of the CRM world, so it was refreshing to see it was a broader technology issue.

Anyway, having identified the problem we were working with the vendor to sort things out. Twenty minutes into the meeting I realized we’d spent the whole time telling the consultant how to set the system up properly. I suddenly realized how stupid an approach this was. I and the assembled project team had an accumulated experience of implementing precisely zero stock management systems, the consultant had by contrast implemented several hundred. Once we shut up and asked the consultant how he recommended setting it up, we made rapid progress. The moral of the story – if you are going to implement technology, work with experts who know how to do it in a way that gets results – and listen to them.

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