The Perfect Order: Conclusion

Quite simply, and by its own definition, Dr. Edward Marien’s Customer’s Bill of Rights is a customer-focused business model that places the customer first and foremost. Whether the goods are for use (e.g., raw materials or components) or for sale (e.g., finished goods), the Customer’s Bill of Rights applies regardless of whether a company is engaged with its downstream supply chain partners (e.g., contract manufacturers, distributors) or upstream supply chain partners (customers, be they businesses or persons). It is incumbent upon the buying party to take the lead in ensuring that technical and operational requirements for achieving The Perfect Order are clearly and openly communicated to the selling party. This effort helps to remove impediments to achieving The Perfect Order.

Supply chains stretch from one end to the other; if each party does their part to ensure that their order is perfect for their customer, the entirety of the supply chain will deliver a perfect order to the final recipient of the end product. Each supply chain participant must recognize their participation and responsibility within the end-to-end supply chain where the consumer makes the final and ultimate decision. If this full supply chain picture is not something known to a company’s supply chain partners, maybe it should be.

Explainer: Retailer-vendor tips

Explainer: Typical supply chain metrics

For sellers selling D2C, you likely very well know the implications of your orders not being perfect. The operational costs of dealing with unhappy customers, handling returned merchandise, applying product credits and shipping out replacement goods quickly chips away at profits.

For retail vendors selling B2B or B2C, financial penalty chargebacks for non-compliance to retailer technical and operational mandates don’t just cause profits to shrink, they also cause performance metrics to suffer. Retailers don’t want to deal with disruptive vendors that cause chaos to their supply chains. Retailers are willing to replace disruptive name-brand vendors with competitors or instead use private label substitutes.

For retailers, you own the responsibility of defining and clearly communicating your order expectations to your vendors. This is one of the Customer’s Rights: the Right Documentation, and for retailers, this is the vendor compliance guidelines, routing guide, EDI specifications, and EDI transactions. Treat your vendors like they were your customers (your consumers)…like you really value them. Retailers, you own the responsibility of ensuring that your vendors are enabled to succeed. Placing barriers in their path—unwieldly portals, unhelpful or incapable software providers, cryptic communications—only inhibits your vendors’ ability to comply and unfairly stacks the rules of the game against them. You can and should be doing better.

For the retail industry, there’s been talk about The Perfect Order for decades. And as an industry, you’ve been complaining about supply chain disruption and (incorrectly and unfairly) solely blaming the vendors. Here is an opportunity, as an industry, to embrace what I believe is the best definition of The Perfect Order and create a helpful framework to guide the industry—retailers and vendors and service providers—toward improvement.

Today, retailers, software companies, and retail industry organizations (sometimes together with advisory firms) offer a lot of training on a wide variety of topics: portals, standards, software, and practices. But I think that what remains lacking is an end-to-end framework that provides guidance on how it all fits together, technically, operationally, and comprehensively. Dr. Marien’s Customer’s Bill of Rights does this eloquently as representing what The Perfect Order should be.

(In establishing a retail industry framework for The Perfect Order, I refer to something like COSO’s (Committee of Sponsoring Organization, www.coso.org) Internal Control Framework. It may not answer every single question, but it is a how-to guide that covers a wide array of related topics. And I think that like COSO, the retail industry should have an independent and multi-perspective committee that is dedicated to The Perfect Order initiative.)

Execution is the competitive edge in a commoditized world. Whether a D2C seller or a B2B/B2C vendor, you’ve got competitors waiting to replace you should you fail your customer, so don’t. Investments are required in software systems and business operations that are up-to-date and synchronized to perform to the expectations of your customers. Hire the right personnel and ensure that they are trained and continually educated. Engage continually with your suppliers and your customers on technical and operational issues to create a seamless end-to-end supply chain flow.

Retailers, you are not without your own competitors, whether it is D2C marketplaces or each other. How many of you have gone out of business in the last 10 or 20 years, and how many of you continue to be on the edge of failure? It behooves you to work toward helping each other and working to create a stronger industry overall. Understand that you have vendors of various demographics, and what your large vendors are capable of is not necessarily what your small vendors can always accomplish, yet you need them all to create a diverse shopping experience for consumers. I’m not asking you to sacrifice your supply chain efficiencies; all I’m suggesting is that you can be implementing your supply chain initiatives better and more creatively so that they are more clearly understood, and more able to be implemented without so many unnecessary exceptions. Don’t push your problems onto your vendors.

I think that Dr. Edward Marien’s Customer’s Bill of Rights truly represents The Perfect Order, and that he rightfully deserves full credit for his clear and creative framework. I was merely the sword‑wielding (no bullwhips for me!) swashbuckling archeologist who dug it up, dusted it off, and provided an updated interpretation. For those who read this series, I hope that this was insightful and helpful and will be applied toward improving your enterprises and delivering perfect orders to all of your customers.

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