Il caso SKF: individuazione e implementazione di un processo di snellimento strategico a supporto delle vendite e dell'assistenza clienti

My elaborate comes out from the internship experience in the sales department of SKF Industries (leader in the bearing business), where I had the opportunity to examine in depth some aspects of the internal innovative process that I only studied theoretically during the master course. “Improving customer service and lead-times levels” were the objectives my office was trying to pursue, but without knowing how to reach them. Therefore, I have been commissioned to understand which processes can be slimmed down, by understanding the employees'needs, the procedures that do not work well and what is changeable; in order to provide an innovative change that can effectively support the daily activities of sales. In doing so, I asked the opinion of my colleagues by submitting them a survey, built on the customer service daily tasks. They evaluated the time spent per each activity and the related difficulty and importance. Findings showed that “order handling” has many critical issues in terms of operating procedures and sometimes they become a waste of time. Therefore, my manager and I identified some orders procedures to revise. One of them is the turnover updating, that is update every day by hand, from the sales members. Particularly, at the beginning of every month, a turnover forecast is extracted from the management system and the customer service is expected to update the invoice number and the local currency of the value. If the quantity or the price is different from the forecast, the customer service will change, add or delete the order from the billable. This process takes time and in order to be faster, some order lines are copied & pasted and some mistakes can accrued. Consequently, it is necessary to make this process automatically updated every day. The second target was the enhancement of the lead-times levels. In doing so, it is necessary to have an updated order book that is in line with the order book planned by the supply chain. Then, if the order books are both aligned, is possible to maintain the promise for the client. Hence, I focused on the refresher order book, in order to avoid misunderstanding and lack of communication, by making everything automatically updated from our management system and at the same time matching the management system's information of the supply chain. The answer of my assignment is the creation of two queries from COH, the management system used by the sales department, which allow a daily extraction of two different files Excel concerning the order book and the invoices bring up to the current day. However, the real innovation lies in having found a way to enter all invoices information within the order book query and as a consequence, extrapolating a single file containing the entire situation of orders: from orders just entered, to open orders of 3-5 years and orders already invoiced. Get to the point, the result is a process innovation, because it involves changes in the way the company carries out its activities, for improving its efficiency and effectiveness. The extent of change of our innovation, (that depends on the distance of innovation from an existing process), is incremental. Indeed, it is a further development of an existing process, with the objective of optimize the order handling of customer service office. So, nothing new has been invented, but adapted to the company circumstances. These circumstances are dictated by lack of time and heavy data processing work.