BLOGS

One way to learn how to provide more value for your customers is to better understand what it's like for them to do business with your company, finding out what works well and what doesn't, and then improving their experience. An exercise to help you with this discovery process is customer journey mapping.

Customer journey mapping in three steps:

• Collaborate with the right people.
  Gather the right people from across your organization, making sure you include someone from all departments that have a part in the customer's process of completing a purchase from your organization. This might include people in sales, customer service, the web team, shop floor, shipping, accounts receivable, etc. 

• Put yourself in your customer's shoes.
  Pretend you are the customer and identify all the steps they go through when they buy from you. A big white board can come in handy. When you document the flow of all the touchpoints, it starts to look like a map. 

• Analyze the experience at each touchpoint.
  Next, be very honest and talk about the quality of the experience for your customers at each point. For the things that everyone agrees work well-that's great, no changes needed. For things that don't work well-you've just uncovered a new business opportunity. This step can be hard to talk about as a group, but be brave and focus on the positive: finding new business opportunities by helping your customers.

Innovate for your customers
Take the new-found opportunities-areas you want to improve for your customers-and start brainstorming ways to transform those rough patches into a better customer experience. Digital solutions play a big part here-there are many ways in which technology can add value in your customer relationships. 

A robust eCommerce solution can simplify your customers' often-complex process of B2B purchasing with an intuitive, easy-to-use way to research, compare, and order your products online. Search engine optimization (SEO) capabilities help you put your brand in front of prospective customers who research your products and do price comparisons online. Self-service portals offer your customers an easy way to find answers about their orders, products, or invoices anytime, anywhere, without relying on your customer service office. A strong analytics solution  allows you to use the data from your customer purchasing processes to increase sales with order recommendations, better insight into customer purchase behaviors, and closer analysis of response data. With these advanced insights, you are positioned to make continuous improvements in the use of data collected online and internally for faster, better business decisions.

Customer centricity is key for manufacturing growth
No matter what products you manufacture, becoming more customer-centric is central to your ability to remain relevant and grow in today's evolving manufacturing markets. To succeed with a B2B digital commerce strategy, begin by thinking like your customers to understand their buying journey, and then find better ways for them to do business with you with digital solutions. To learn more about B2B eCommerce for manufacturing

Big Ass Fans' first enterprise resource planning (ERP) system promised scalability-however, that wasn't the case as CEO Carey Smith recalled when the company was making around $10 million in revenue, “I remember them saying, 'even if you get as big as $25 million [in revenue] we'll be able to help you.'” With the company's innovative fan designs quickly catching on in the market, they soon found themselves pushing that system's upper boundaries.

After an extensive search, the company landed on Epicor ERP, which has proven capable of growing alongside the company. “It's only a ceiling fan, but it's a very complex product,” said Bill Nall, chief information officer, Big Ass Fans. “That drives a lot of complexity on the bill of materials and how all those parts come together on the factory floor. That's where I think technology is critical because you can't manage that level of complexity without having a tight ERP system.”

Full visibility across a global supply chain

The company achieves its aggressive growth rates thanks in part to continuously reevaluating its processes and products. “We have grown since 2008 at a rate of about 30% a year every single year. We do that by developing new products, by continually developing and re-organizing the company, and the way in which we do business,” Smith added.

The company has manufacturing plants globally, so the ability for all of them to stay connected is paramount to its success, and it all starts with order fulfillment and planning. Big Ass Fans plans production well in advance to meet the customer's expectation. “A good ERP system is huge from the standpoint of being able to take all of the demand, all of the sales orders, and tie everything together,” said Greg Finley, production manager. “Epicor ERP literally ties our company together from beginning to end and all the way to shipping product to customers in a timely manner.” 

Business intelligence in the supply chain

Big Ass Fans is no stranger to some of the biggest challenges in manufacturing-reducing costs, maximizing inventory, and meeting fluctuating demand. However, where it sets itself apart is how deep it goes into the data provided by its Epicor ERP to grow its business through procurement-whether it's leveraging existing vendor data for better rates on materials or identifying new business opportunities, using the business intelligence data provided by its Epicor ERP solution is at the forefront of the company's growth goals.

“I think one of the things that's most important when I look at the business as we've grown is the fact we're able to have more analytics, more vision on the company and on the parts,” said Smith. “In order to take advantage of new opportunities, you have to have business intelligence. We think that the ERP system that Epicor provides that's a major component-all of our analytics are built on that. It's very important for us, because we can't tell what opportunities we can avail ourselves of if we don't have the figures. If we can't quantify it, it doesn't exist.”

Looking back at switching from the ERP system struggling with a $25 million revenue company, Carey said, “From a customer perspective, talking to a supplier I feel honesty is important, and we're very pleased with the way it's worked out. Now it's been 10 years later and it's [Epicor ERP] still working. It's great. We've been able to grow into a $300 million company by investing in software that allows us to reach our customers, and control our inventory and production. I can't imagine how this could have been done without having a very robust software system and partner, like Epicor.”