Working Company Wide to Best Serve Customers

Consider the humble beehive: every bee has a particular job and does it efficiently. The result: a happy, well-run workplace for all concerned.

That’s the concept behind customer activation teams at Imperial Sugar: marshalling the right resources up and down the line to get the job done right for customers.

“We’ve implemented many new processes designed to address the expectations of large and small customers alike,” says Warren Hunt, Imperial Sugar’s director of Sales Planning.

“To do that, coordination between sales and operations must be tightly linked to inventories of finished goods, be they bulk or consumer-facing items,” adds Master Scheduler Sheila Turner, “so that customers have the confidence to place orders they know will be filled when they want, effortlessly, with no delays.”

Large retailers, for example, have different demands than large bulk customers. They might require customer-facing products, requiring unique packaging materials, while bulk customers simply want granulated sugar in trucks or rail cars.

When an activation team is formed, representatives from every area of the company analyze those specific demands, then backs those specifics into detailed checklists for every step of the customer activation order fulfillment process.

These cross-functional teams might encompass a variety of departments and responsibilities – sales, marketing, logistics, purchasing, transportation, production, operations and packaging are just the start. Contingency plans also are created to anticipate possible glitches: for example, what if a materials vendor fails to deliver packaging materials?

“Customer activation teams aren’t appropriate for every customer,” says Hunt. “Some customers require a special focus, be it an existing customer launching a new product or a new customer with large volume requirements. Our goal is to be able to leverage all our resources to treat each customer as if they’re our only customer.”

Teams meet at least once a week, sometimes more, and stay in constant contact to make sure every step of the process is coordinated and that there are no gaps.

“The result,” says Hunt, “is a smoother on-boarding process for new customers and better customer fulfillment for existing ones. Our intention is to make sure customers know that their complete satisfaction is our ongoing goal.”