B2B Visibility and Compliance are Foundation of Convenience: It's Coming For You

Visibility, compliance, and convenience is a major theme that will continue to accelerate as far as I'm concerned. Without the first two, you will simply never get to convenience for your customer? Why?

I spent the day yesterday as a guest of the great folks at Logicbroker yesterday listening to some inspirational talks about where eCommerce is headed. The talks about B2B really stuck with me.

The reason is simple. Your operational fires will consume your teams, and you will never be able to work on the important things. What does compliance mean? First, visibility. What is the status of that customer order or pallet? Do you know at a glance?

Second, do your trading partners communicate the right details to you the first time? Or is your team on the phone all day chasing down transactions. You have software, but then the dirty secret of supply chain organizations is they are backed up by telephone calls. Lots and lots of telephone calls and frantic e-mails.

"You didn't send the tracking information about this order. I didn't get an estimated delivery date for this order. I didn't get delivery method for this order. I didn't get an ASN for the order you told me on the phone you would send over."

The issue of hiring means that your teams need to scale. Visibility and compliance are the foundation. Start here. It's not the sexy work, but without this foundation you will never understand why there are so many exceptions in your supply chain, rather than steadily rising NPS.

Amazon taught us looooong ago -- Improved customer service is due to trust. Trust is about reducing variance. If you really start TRYING to measure your variance, I guarantee your first problems will be visibility, then compliance. There is just no easy way around it.

Thanks to Craig Regan and Peyman Zamani for hosting a great event.