Supply Chain Management Review

Robert A. Rudzki

Deliberate Supply Chain Interruptions
July 29, 2008

The conventional wisdom is that a company should avoid supply chain disruptions at all costs. After all, supply disruptions can adversely affect customer satisfaction and customer loyalty, with long-term implications.

There is an industry that appears to allow – or perhaps we should say create - supply chain disruptions as part of its product marketing strategy. And, the individual customers seem to tolerate it. Sound crazy? It’s not. You’ve probably experienced it yourself. It happens regularly in consumer products. 

I recently stood in line one Saturday morning with one of my children to purchase a Nintendo “Wii Fit” – a clever extension of the original Nintendo Wii product. The product had been released a few months earlier, but was reportedly in short supply. While this was not unexpected for a hot new consumer product, what we learned while standing in line – waiting for the local Best Buy store to open - caused a few customers to get a little hot themselves. 

A lady a few positions ahead of me in line began to recount her conversation with an assistant store manager earlier in the week. According to her account, she learned that this particular store had a sizeable quantity of the product on hand as early as Tuesday of that week, but store employees were instructed to tell customers who were calling daily that no product was available until Saturday. Meantime, many of the kids or their parents wasted lots of time and energy calling around to competing stores in hopes of finding the elusive product. 

As you might expect, that purported procedure resulted in the early Saturday morning queuing of hopeful kids (with their parents) – well in advance of the store opening time. Not exactly a customer satisfying experience, if you’ve been there. 

Try something like that in the industrial world, and the prospective customer would start looking for alternatives. Not always possible in consumer products, especially when your child is intent on having a very specific brand name product – with the hype factor involved. If enough individual consumers share this frustration, maybe it’s time to try again with consumer buying groups. That might be the only way to create some buying leverage on behalf of the little guy consumer.

Posted by Robert A. Rudzki on July 29, 2008 | Comments (0)