The Chinese New Year can be challenging for Chinese manufacturers to navigate during the month-long holiday.
“The labor shortage of people taking time off can cause slower lead times and logistical problems for many companies because it is hard to anticipate order deliveries,” said David Romano, key account manager for APAC.
This past New Year, Greif’s Flexible Packaging and Services team in Changzhou, China exhibited exceptional customer service by maintaining all of the lead times for its largest customer in China. Thanks to a proactive action plan to enhance its communication, inventory and staffing, the team also saw and improvement in its Net Promoter Score (NPS) during the company’s most recent survey with customers.
“I’m proud because we have seen improvement in performance in a year’s time once we implemented the true vision of Greif, which states: in industrial packaging, be the best performing customer service company in the world,” said Romano. “As long as we put the customer in focus and we have engaged colleagues to drive that vision, it’s becomes a pleasure to see the results of generating added value for our customers and ourselves.”
To improve communication with the particular customer, the Changzhou team re-organized the daily work in the sales department and assigned a dedicated sales executive to serve at the customer’s China site. Also, instead of only communicating with the customer’s head office and purchasers, the team began visiting the customer site regularly to hear the voices of the customer’s warehouse employees, packaging engineers, and quality control department.
Communicating more fluidly helped the team realize additional changes that could be made to increase efficiency. The team began sharing a transparent plan with the customer on a weekly basis, allowing the team to see which stage the order of big bags is in – for example: extrusion, weaving, cutting, sewing and shipping stages.
Greif Changzhou saw the positive results from the action plan during the Chinese New Year and continues to practice the improved processes today. The positive change has led to expanded business with the customer in Thailand. FPS is now working to find where similar changes can be made to further enhance its customer service with other business accounts around the world.
Learn more about Greif’s big bags.
