Today’s warehouse and distribution center managers are under the gun. Not only are they faced with cost reductions and technology changes, companies are also looking at the company’s fulfillment and logistics divisions to drive strategy, said Karl Manrodt, assistant professor and director for the Southern Center for Logistics and Intermodal Transportation at Georgia Southern University during the 13th Annual National Conference on Operations and Fulfillment held in Orlando, FL through Wednesday.
Granted, of the myriad metrics that catalogers can benchmark themselves against, Manrodt told attendees to just focus on one: The perfect order. What’s a perfect order? Simply, the perfect order encompasses four elements that directly involve the customer, such as on-time delivery of the package, order accuracy, a damage-free shipment as well as a completed and accurate invoice. “It’s the one metric that more companies should look at,” Manrodt says. “Because that’s what the customer sees. Because if even one element in four is incorrect, he says, “You might lose the customer forever.”