Posted on 20th September, 2009 | No Comment
Bradbury Anderson, CEO of consumer electronics retailer Best Buy, understands the complexity of- and potential payoff from- a synchronized supply chain. Two years ago, Best Buy began a major effort to overhaul how the company does business. Although sales were growing, Anderson and his senior managers knew that future growth would depend on superior customer service as way of differentiating the company from its competitors. Making that happen, says Anderson, would mean giving store managers and frontline employees the power to tailor the product mix and marketing to suit the needs o local customers. In the past, Best Buy had made those decisions from corporate headquarters.
To execute this new strategy, Best Buy’s supply chain processes had to be improved. For example, before this initiative, if a particular television model wasn’t selling, there was no efficient way to get that information to the Chinese factory making it. Now, a $130 million investment in technology- including the upgrade of its inventory tracking systems- will streamline the supply chain, says Anderson, and help Best Buy better match customer’s tastes with what vendors are manufacturing. This cuts down on unsold inventory and helps save money.
Despite the greater complexity of this new business and supply model, Anderson says the idea is to keep store-level operations simple, with the corporate supply chain absorbing the complexity, so employees can spend their time servicing customers, and not worrying about logistics issues.
At the same time, Best Buy is revamping its relationships with its vendors by sharing its own research about customer likes and dislikes. Unlike the past, hen conversations were limited to price negotiations, Best Buy executives now work with vendors on improving delivery times and keeping out-of-stock items to a minimum.
Posted on 2nd September, 2009 | No Comment
One of our favorite love stories is actually a children’s book entitled Guess How Much I Love You by Sam McBratney. It’s a humorous yet touching story to a father (Big Nutbrown hare) and his son (Little Nutbrown Hare) trying to describe the depth of their love for each other through the concepts of length, width and distance. This theme has special significance for us parents because, long before this book was published, we used to show our kids how much we loved them by stretching out our arms on either side (I Love you this much) and then bringing our arms together to enfold the child ina tight, warm embrace.
Love is, in many ways, a stretching of one’s self- whether it’s the psychological-emotional stretching of ego boundaries, or the physical “stretching” of a single room into a family home, or the biological stretching of a mother’s womb to accommodate a new life. Or even, in the words of Dr. M. Scott Peck, the willingness “to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth’
Of course we didn’t know that when we got married 26 years ago. We learned it the hard way- with bitter words, cold silences and a hardness of heart that would surface every time the “me” triumphed over the “we” We had our conflicts. What marriage doesn’t? Stretching can be painful and scary, and there were times when calling it quits and walking out the door was very, very tempting. But each time one of us made that conscious choice to continue to love the other, even when that spouse was at his or her most unlovable self, our marriage was strengthened. Each time we chose to forgive, we became a little more loving.
As a young married couple, we thought love was that wonderful feeling of being perfect in each other’s arms. Forgiveness then was a matter of justice, not love. As an “old” married couple, we have grown to see love as that wonderful decision to accept that we are imperfect in each other’s arms, and let in our marriage and in our family. We know now that we cannot claim to love if we cannot be willing to forgive, But only god could have made that realization possible.
