Approach
Most operating problems are handoff problems.
Distribution, service, retail, wholesale and IT usually report up separate ladders and optimize against each other. The warehouse hits its pick rate. The contact center hits its handle time. Margin leaks out between them and nobody owns the gap.
My work has been to run those functions as one system. At Levenger that meant holding the P&L across all of them at once, with a $10M operating budget, five VP and Director level direct reports, capital approval authority and quarterly board reporting. Reorganizing order processing for immediate pick and pack moved same day shipping from about 60 to 98 percent on 700 to 1,000 orders a day. Pricing and promotional discipline, product mix, sourcing and freight moved gross margin from about 58 to about 65 percent across nine years.
At BEL USA the same lens applied to service. A 300 person organization came down to 175 across 14 months, productivity per agent rose 30 percent, and $1M came out of annual operating expense. The part that mattered more: putting revenue ownership inside the service model took the function from 20 to 50 percent of booked company sales.
Thirty years of it started in technology, building a global network from the ground up at Aurafin and carrying it from under $50M in revenue to a Berkshire Hathaway acquisition. That background is why the systems question comes first for me, not last.
Run the functions as one system and the handoffs stop being where the money goes.
