Innovation, Productivity And Customer Satisfaction: An Interconnected Approach
By: Deepa Param Singhal
Innovation fuels growth and innovators lead their respective markets to cater to the growing customer demands while ensuring new and exciting experiences. They always seem to introduce the best ideas that customers want, and able to achieve comparative advantage vis-à-vis their competitors. Smart producers are well aware that innovation does not only limit to the production and delivery of a product but also provide their faithful customers with desired innovative experience.
Innovators often do their end-to end management of data and processes including idea formation, manufacturing, servicing, development on a single platform for innovation and drive top-line growth. This further results in effective innovation, ensuring that customers are always satisfied, and businesses prosper even during adverse market dynamics and worst scenarios.
- Creative and collaborative idea generation
The pace with which a business can generate ideas that customers can value and determines its ability to grow. However, with a variety of ideas, the BIG IDEA usually goes unnoticed.
To foster a culture of creativity and innovation, top innovators directly involve all stakeholders-including their workforce and key suppliers in the innovation process of delivering a simple-to-use cloud applications that are highly visual, mobile, and collaborative. By making innovation more structured and collaborative, they build some of the best practices to help incubate their ideas and interlink innovation with their strategic goals.
Smart innovators do not depend only on crowd sourced ideas rather, they promote ideas and turn them into successful development projects. They also closely monitor feedback from their customers, products, and factories to help promote winning ideas.
2. Accumulation
Organizing of data sets is extremely crucial for organisations these days. The first step is to collect the data, separate and organize it to utilise it effectively. To cater to the market demand, organizations must completely analyse data. Given the current disruptions, this is especially true for stakeholders in the supply chain system.
Earlier, the development and supply chain planning companies used to completely trust on disparate systems and processes. This implies that when development was ready to release a new product to planners, they simply ’threw it over the wall’ into what quickly became a data absorbing and synchronization exercise. Thus, it is difficult to attain end-to-end visibility required to drive faster and more frequent innovation.
Innovators are making use of a unified platform for continuous innovation. When combined with flexible sourcing capabilities, they have a strategic way to qualify suppliers and keep their trusted sources of supply flowing to support new product and service objectives.
3. Integration
To ensure that value creation can take place anywhere in their extended ecosystem, firms need to make sure that their research and development is a one collaborative process and working in an integrated manner with their supply partners. However, it still holds several challenges due to increased customer demand for innovative products, challenges like sourcing of larger portions of materials from suppliers across the globe.
It is imperative for companies to increasingly involving their suppliers throughout the product lifecycle, because of these complexities. Companies must also SCM software to realign their production and dissemination of scarce products to the most profitable, highest-priority customers and channels.
To smoothly collaborate on new product designs, modern product innovation compels both development and engineering teams at both the manufacturer and the supplier end to use of a single platform.
Unified platforms allow businesses to properly qualify suppliers and assess their ability to deliver against requirements such as sustainability, production capacity, and corporate codes of conduct. Thus to improve the efficiency and transparency of their operations the entire supply chains have started leveraging blockchain digital ledger technology.
4. Personalization
High-quality products must be produced faster, better, and with greater emphasis on consumer choices in today’s competitive marketplace. Manufacturers must increase their agility, enhance decision-making, and achieve maximum even with fewer resources. Visibility and collaboration throughout the innovation cycle and supply chain network are critical to success.
Whereas manufacturers must leverage capabilities such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence, and Robotics to connect customer, product, and factory feedback across the value chain to maximize efficiency. Now is the time to fully utilize your SCM solutions to simulate possible scenarios and create forecasts that better predict ever-changing global demand patterns.
Thus, personalization is the key to achieve customer satisfaction and brand loyalty. Manufacturing companies that use a single platform for innovation have a better scope to identify what their customers want and then design, produce, and deliver products to markets more quickly.
5. Delivering according to customer feedback
At present, almost everything now can be offered as a service, from selling grocery to heavy machinery to software. What was once “sell it and forget it” engagement with your consumers is now the beginning of a long-term relationship. Customers are benefiting from these new business models because they can now rent, subscribe, and pay on a per-use basis. They can quickly swap, if they do not like the service. For instance, as a service provider, companies must keep their services and equipment running smoothly, Thus, to grow and optimize their return on investment, successful innovators design their services around the end-users- customers.
As customer buying behaviours shift—particularly from physical to online channels—businesses need to monitor and react to those shifts, and plan for the “ripple effects” across their facilities, data centres, and extended supply chains. Organizations that take this step towards smart innovation will emerge as innovators and succeed in 2022 and ahead.
(The author is Vice President, CX and HCM, Oracle Asia Pacific and the views expressed in this article are her own)
