Blog Archives
The Procurement Perspective: Why should I give you an hour of my time?
John Murphy, Procurement Director at Royal Mail Group plc talks about strategic relationships and what makes them successful from his perspective.
Cranfield Key Account Management Best Practice Research Club
Understanding the World of Procurement and the mind of the Professional Purchaser
Rob Maguire, Partner at Maguire Izatt, offers his thoughts around the relationship between key account managers and procurement professionals and how businesses might improve performance.
Cranfield Key Account Management Best Practice Research Club
Fostering a culture of innovation
Jan Rosier is exploring what the CEO does within their role in order to foster innovation within an organisation. Specifically Jan is looking into the type of relationship they have with their R&D function and the effect this has on the culture within the organisation.
Coffee sourcing at Nestlé
Dr Gabriela Alvarez, Director at Latitude talks about her research, which focuses on sustainable value chains within Nestlé and its portfolio of very different brands. For example, Nespresso have developed a sustainability approach from the farmer, community and a quality perspective, whereas Nescafé and other, larger brands within the organisation have other considerations, such as mobility, securing raw materials, etc.
Building relationships to manage carbon emissions
Andrea Abrahams, General Director, talks about the carbon management programme, BP Target Neutral, which works to the framework of reduce, replace and neutralise. Andrea also gives an example of where offsetting is a part of the carbon management strategy.
Customer Experience Insight and Optimisation PhD Opp – apply by 8 Mar
Cranfield School of Management – one of Europe’s top management schools – is inviting applications to undertake a PhD on the above research project, offered by the Centre for Strategic Marketing and Sales. Study may be on a part-time or full-time basis; funding may be available for a successful full-time candidate.
The project will be supervised by Dr Emma Macdonald and Professor Hugh Wilson.
The research opportunity
We know from our work with the managers who are part of the Cranfield Customer Management Forum that they are concerned with both understanding and optimising their customers’ experience. This is also a concern for academics who view the domain of customer experience management as offering a rich agenda for future research (Verhoef et al, 2009).
Customer experience includes all of the encounters that a customer has with the company’s paid-for communications and service touchpoints. But it also includes post-purchase usage as well as non-company controlled touchpoints such as retail channel contacts and peer-to-peer encounters, such as talking about the brand with a friend or seeing someone else using it. But most firms have very limited visibility of these. With insight into the holistic customer experience it is possible to understand the relative impact of touchpoints on customer satisfaction and other relationship measures. It is also feasible to identify the linkages between touchpoints as the customer moves along the journey to purchase. For the past three years we have been working on developing better techniques to provide such holistic customer experience insight, such as real-time experience tracking (see our recent article and blogs in Harvard Business Review by Macdonald, Wilson and Konus, below). This is an on-going theme of our research; as well as further applications of the real-time experience tracking method, we are also interested in exploring the potential of social media mining to understand the complete customer journey. Research opportunities include (but are not limited to):
- Using real-time experience tracking data in conjunction with sales data to model the customer’s journey to purchase, and hence improve on the econometric models currently used by practitioners to evaluate marketing communications
- Evaluating in particular the impact of online and offline word of mouth on the recipient, as well as what drives these behaviours, again using real-time experience tracking
- Applications of real-time experience tracking to understand other behaviours such as purchasing a green product (see also separate call on sustainability and customer behaviour)
- Fusing social media data with sales data to model the impact of customer perceptions on sales.
As well as needing better sources of experience insight, managers are also struggling with the processes of experience optimisation. They are hampered by the traditional product silo structure within the organisation, which may prevent a smooth handover of the customer from one department to another to match the customer journey. Organisations used to doing the talking also find it challenging to listen and respond to customers when the customer is the initiator of a conversation. Issues worthy of investigation within the domain of customer experience optimisation include:
- how experience insight is disseminated and actioned
- the design of customer experience management structures and processes within the company
- processes of customer relationship management and integrated communications that draw on experience insight.
Other PhD Opportunities offered by
Dr Emma Macdonald and Professor Hugh Wilson:
(Applications also by 8th March)
Reflections and challenges facing procurement recruitment during the recession
Doug Rode, Managing Director of Procurement and Supply Chain at Michael Page talks about some of the misconceptions around the ease of recruiting over the past few years given the current economic climate. Whilst social media and the internet have facilitated easier access to the right candidates, Doug also points out that the recruitment process itself can have a big impact on keeping the right person engaged.
Who is on the front foot – the Buyer or Supplier? The Supplier’s perspective
Michael Crean, Director of Service Division explains how SKF delivers value to their customers though investment in tools which enable them to understand their customers and engage with them in order to deliver value which is relevant to their industry and needs.
Improving relationships with external suppliers and internal colleagues
Kevin Ferrol, Supply Chain Manager at Centrica explains how, in order to maximise value for their own business, relationship management is a key focus area for Centrica. Kevin outlines how successful SRM takes time, energy and resource – Centrica have separated out the roles of contract owners and relationship managers in order to keep discussions relevant and on track.
SoM Research Insights 