Collaboration Community Continuous Improvement

The consumer collaboration community implementation and maintenance process and procedures provide an excellent model and challenge for a continuous improvement support model.  The consumer community requires flexibility and creativity to provide the type of community that will attract and then retain consumers.  The model that supports this and ensures engagement of the community members is the continuous improvement model.  It will be important for the success and ability to attain and maintain participation, retention and value for all members of this community that the community continuously improve to grow.  

This continuous improvement program will require the active participation of both the consumer and the retail team responsible for supporting and growing the community.  The management and coordination of the improvements will fall on the retailer community management and will require knowledge and coordination of the activities across the consumer community, the extended supply chain and the sales channels.  This continuous improvement require program management across multiple projects, programs and platforms to ensure that the objectives are not overlooked.  This is obviously no small task and will require the support and participation of all supporting platforms to effectively coordinate.  There are many stakeholders for this cross organization program and the coordination requires a strong focus on communication and coordination of the objectives.  

The participation from the consumer community coordination as it relates to the other platforms and functions will focus on the types of data that is and can be collected from the site membership.  The external focus of this community is the consumer participation and the consumer member objectives, while the internal focus of this community is the services required to support the membership demands and the data that can be collected for big data analysis by the internal platforms such as the sales channel and the extended supply chain.  The external services and ease of functionality provide the incentive for consumers to participate and the data collected provides the incentive for the internal partners and platforms to participate.

As with most other offerings and platforms the level of simplicity experienced by the participants of the covers a level surprising level of complexity and these services and continuous improvement program is no different.  The number of platforms and the different participants make this a very complex program that will require a high level of coordination.  If you do not provide the coordination and focus required to manage the cross platform initiatives you will not achieve the benefits.  Then, of course, if you do not achieve the benefits you will lose the support of leadership and it will only be a short time until the program collapses.  This will be a terrible shame because the value that can be achieved from the successful coordination is immense.

And now for the audience participation portion of the show…

ECommerce will have wide ranging impacts on both the retail and manufacturing sectors.  How can you focus these abilities to improve the consumer's experience?  Improving the consumer’s experience will require a re-evaluation of the sales channels, the manufacturing channels and practices and the supply chain channels and practices from the raw materials to the consumers’ homes.  In order to ensure and maintain success in this new reality you must harness the tools and capabilities in many new areas.  How can you support these continuously changing requirements?

Consumer and Supply Chain Challenges

There will be many challenges to face while developing the consumer collaboration community and then even more challenges integrating the community and collected data with the extended supply chain collaborative network as a strategic feed.  As with any new strategic objective the challenges must be met with patience and perseverance  in order to maintain the communities and then achieve the potential value.  This is no small feat to overcome, there are no cookbook implementation for either community to work from and each requires patience and creativity to achieve results.  

The consumer collaborative network will provide the greatest challenge because it requires commitment from leadership to develop the community into one that will engage the consumer and provide the return value to the retailer.  This type of collaborative network has not been achieved especially in the manner that is required to achieve sustaining results.  There are many retailer services that support pieces of the puzzle and then there are many social networks and services that provide other pieces to the puzzle.  The challenge comes from putting all of the pieces together into a forum that is robust and flexible to support growth and change based on feedback and direction from the consumer community members.  This requires commitment from leadership because it will involve a great deal of trial and error and potentially redesign of the framework to support the direction.  As a result of these challenges, I think it is important to build the initial versions on a cloud framework utilizing free tools, services and even infrastructure.  This reduces the initial investment, other than time of course, in developing the community so there is a cushion for failure.  The strategy to develop the community should be to ‘fail forward’.

The next big challenge is the utilization of data collected from the consumer network to provide real information and value to the extended supply chain network.  This is an especially difficult challenge because you must identify data from many different sources and reference points to bring together in a manner and method that provide information to the members of your supply chain network.  This will require a creative, true trial and error method to experiment with data and questions.  This is the big data challenge that will be most difficult because the question begins related to one aspect of the business and then the information must somehow be enhanced by the various different data points available from the consumer community.  For example, the retailer identifies a drop in sales for a dress and begins by evaluating trends in sales of similar products.  At the same time retailer can begin to mine the data from the consumer community relating community activity to both the specific dress and then the dress line as a whole.  This is where creative analysis comes into play because you must search and analyze ‘like’ types of data and put together to come to suggestions and reasons for the results.  

The keys to success in starting this are the same really as any other endeavor; patience and creativity.  The trick here is to extend these two keys as far and as long as possible.  This is definitely the long game in a short game environment.

And now for the audience participation portion of the show…

ECommerce will have wide ranging impacts on both the retail and manufacturing sectors.  How can you focus these abilities to improve the consumer's experience?  Improving the consumer’s experience will require a re-evaluation of the sales channels, the manufacturing channels and practices and the supply chain channels and practices from the raw materials to the consumers’ homes.  In order to ensure and maintain success in this new reality you must harness the tools and capabilities in many new areas.  How can you support these continuously changing requirements?

Consumer and Supply Chain Integration

Your supply chain can gain a great deal of value by integrating data collected from the collaborative consumer community.  This value can be gained in product quality evaluations, the product life cycle (both developing new products and also achieving product longevity), both purchase and reverse logistics services to name just a few.  This consumer community should be looked at as a key strategic tool for retailers to collect real time and honest consumer data for analysis of trends and consumer shopping patterns.  I believe that the days of traditional consumer surveys and focus groups are numbered and will be replaced by the tools and consumer interaction supported through the consumer community.  

The value to the retailer is truly a by-product of the interaction and services offered through the collaborative community.  This consumer interaction in the community along with the services supported by the community should first be focused on the needs and requests of the consumers, then second the data collected from this interaction will be available for data mining by the retailer and the extended supply chain.  It is the classic networking adage - ‘you must first make a deposit before you make a withdrawal’.  In this case the deposit is first providing the community for consumers to gather and share their experience and questions, then second the services offered by the retailer to enhance that experience.  The withdrawal of course is the data collected from the interactions in the community for analysis.

This framework will not only increase the accuracy of the retailer’s analysis, it will also speed the analysis itself.  Think about the benefit of this data store of consumer interactions, when you identify a potential product or service you will simply need to analyze the data at hand, revising and adding to the data as questions are answered and new questions identified.  In the current model, the retailer would first identify the question(s), then develop a survey to test results, revising the survey to improve the ‘accuracy’ of responses, then potentially develop a focus group to further test and refine the results.  Utilizing the data collected from the consumer community will allow the retailer to determine the results of their questions in all likelihood before the first consumer survey could be developed.

The marriage of data from one end (raw materials and manufacturing) of the extended supply chain to the other (the end consumer) will provide a treasure of information to support the all partners within this network, up to and including the consumer because of the improvements in products and services that their feedback will promote.  Companies are realizing the value that can be derived from data and the need for data simply grows as the data is turned into information.  Companies such as Google and Amazon are been early adopters and have realized the benefits of this strategy.  They have collected the consumer information though from their interaction (sales and searches for instance) the next step in this strategy though must be the active engagement of the consumer in a community. This active engagement will allow for sharing more data and refining the facts, the community will provide a means for companies to eventually develop a conversation with their customers and this is where the next level of value will be achieved.

And now for the audience participation portion of the show…

ECommerce will have wide ranging impacts on both the retail and manufacturing sectors.  How can you focus these abilities to improve the consumer's experience?  Improving the consumer’s experience will require a re-evaluation of the sales channels, the manufacturing channels and practices and the supply chain channels and practices from the raw materials to the consumers’ homes.  In order to ensure and maintain success in this new reality you must harness the tools and capabilities in many new areas.  How can you support these continuously changing requirements?