Clueless in Customer Fulfillment

Every holiday season I share a few supply chain blunders that I personally experience. This year I am picking on The GAP. More specifically, The GAP's more formal chain called Banana Republic. I've been a loyal customer for many years. This year was no different and my girlfriend ordered a dress online, which was then shipped to my parents house in NY (sadly, the company still doesn't offer the ability to ship internationally). This worked out fine as I planned to bring the dress back to Austria with me during a recent visit. To make a long story short, when I arrived back in Vienna, the dress was too big and I shipped it back so my mom could exchange it.

Armed with the online receipt the store manager wouldn't let my mom exchange it for a smaller size. Nor would she give a store credit. The reason, they needed the bar code on the packing slip. This was tossed out with the paper recylables. No matter, I charged it with the Banana Republic LUXE card for loyal customers, customer fullfillment can fix this easy, right? WRONG! For some reason they cannot print another copy of the packing slip. How customer fulfillment management allows this I have no idea. After speaking with Kate in customer service she tells me that the normal process requires me to ship the dress back to them, via UPS, for free to get the credit. Huh? I replay this back for Kate and say, "So you would rather eat the $20 to have this shipped back to you, not to mention pollute the environment more, instead of simply reprinting me the packing slip and emailing it to me so I can return it to the store." She replies, "yes". I should have asked her how this process fits with the company's new green efforts. I told her I won't be return the dress, but I will be returning my GAP stock.

This is what happens when you don't have an integrated, end to end supply chain, where in this case, logistics and customer fulfillment are disconnected.

The Pony Express and Outsourcing Logistics

The outsourcing of logistics is really nothing new, corporations have been doing it since the 1800's choosing to use the US Pony Express over their own internal resources to ship parcels. But since the days of cowboys and Indians, we've gotten more global and things often need to be delivered in hours rather than days and weeks. With this logistics outsourcing has become more complex, which is why it makes more sense now then ever to hand it off to a logistics provider that is going to invest and build up its capabilities instead of maintaining the status quo. Cementing this reality, earlier this week IBM signed a multi-year contract with the French logistics provider, Geodis, to manage all of IBM's logistics needs globally. So instead of IBM managing hundreds of logistics providers, Geodis will do it for us. Helping them to achieve this will be most of the internal IBM logistics professionals that have been doing it for IBM for years. IBM employees from more than 50 countries will tranfer to Geodis over the next several months after all local country agreements have been achieved. Why you might ask? Well like I said earlier, its Geodis' core business. They will grow and make investments in logistics that wouldn't make sense for IBM. This may sound familar. IBM signed a similar agreement with Geodis back in 1998. Back then they took over our needs for Europe and acquired are European warehouses. So in a sense, this is the evolution of that effort.