Not So Fast, Perfect or Ideal Solutions that Work!
Many of us like fast, perfect and ideal solutions to our supply chain challenges, but our customers, more likely than not, see their world from a different prism…slow, easy and hassle free! So in the interest of our customer’s buy-in do you compromise on your solution or do you force your solution on your customers?
This is a real world dilemma that supply chain professionals face everyday: When to push, when to pull, or when to find the middle ground to get half-a-loaf vs. nothing from our customers! No one likes change, many times, even when it is good for them.
I have three tactics to share with you that you might find useful in your own quest for mastering the art of change management:
- Trade, if you have leverage – Trading is a skill used for thousands of years by people who took full advantage of their leverage. You can do the same if you have something to trade that the other person wants. For example, we know of one supply chain professional that trades requests for new purchases from his customers (moves them up the queue for approval) for changes he wants to see in their buying practices, such as, testing a lower cost alternative product vs. what they are now buying. It’s a simple idea that works very effectively, if you have leverage of any kind.
- Nibble around the edges – Get as much as you can now, and then come back for more bites of the apple at a later date. I used this same tactic in my supply chain career thousand of times. I would obtain agreement from my customers to make a very small change in what they were doing (e.g. removing one or two items from their custom pack or kit that they weren’t using), then I would come back year after year taking more bites of the apple until it was all gone. It worked 98% of the time!
- Wait until the timing is right – When I hear a supply chain manager tell me that one of their physicians or clinicians won’t change his or her practices, even though he or she is costing their hospital thousands of dollars a year, I tell the manager to wait until the timing is right (the physician or clinician moves up, moves on or retires) to make their next move. As you know, timing is everything in the world we live in – even when you want to change something!
There is no easy formula to change people’s minds and hearts, but there are tactics to move the ball forward that aren’t fast, perfect or ideal, yet are much better solutions than doing nothing about the situation at hand. Your goal should be to never let a savings, quality or process improvement opportunity go by without making some positive change happen.
Filed Under: Change Management • savingsblog
