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New year resolutions – why some of them stick while others don’t?
This is the time of the year when many supply chain professionals and teams make their fresh new year resolutions. I have seen a lot of them across teams, industries, and geographies. My experience suggests that their benefits have been mixed.
While some resolutions do motivate the teams and prompt them to take the right actions, several others fall by the wayside in the first month itself. Is there a pattern behind it?
Some resolutions are truly consumer and customer focused… for example, faster deliveries, flexibility in supplies, better availability of assortments, fresher products on shelves. Such resolutions deliver real consumer benefits, resulting in a positive spiral of higher sales and profitability. These have a better chance of sticking.
On the other hand, some resolutions are entirely inward focused and may even compromise on the current consumer benefits… for example, warehouse rationalization leading to higher delivery lead times, reducing frequency of retail coverage by salesmen, less frequent lane servicing to convert part truckloads to full truckloads. Such resolutions are likely to face external resistance from customers and result in lower sales and profits.
Would you like to go through your new year resolutions to check if these are consumer focused or inward focused?