We’ve always had live order, line, and unit reporting and we’ve always had live issue reporting with full drill down to case management but the step of calculating this % performance has always been manual so I’m super excited to advise this is now automated. This means SCS clients can drop into our portal 24/7 and see in real-time our actual performance measurements.
Why this is so important is because ultimately the entire 3PL deal boils down to a fee for a KPI. Lots of 3PL’s promise high KPI performance but as our clients know it’s incredibly rare this promise is delivered on consistently and the proof of service capability is the KPI reporting.
Lots of 3PL’s create manual KPI reports in spreadsheets which is open to abuse and manipulation to make themselves look good. In 2005 SCS released probably the first database-driven KPI system (it was in effect a ticketing system before the concept of a ticketing system was around) I wanted to create a system that was unable to tampered with so we achieved pure, truthful reports (good and bad), I have never worried about issues because I know we’ll fix them, human nature is to hide from issues to avoid confrontation our approach has been the opposite if we don’t know about it we can’t fix it and by creating a system where issues are created by clients and staff cant tamper with the data our KPI reporting is brutally honest and that’s enabled us to build epic systems to fix and address issues.
Since 2001 this KPI system has been a key driver in ensuring our order accuracy has never dropped below 99.7%, in 2022 for the first time in our history we had some line pick accuracies in the low 99 percentile due to the labour crises and this video shows that but I’m pleased to report our company-wide KPIs are well back above 99.7% again.
We use line percentage accuracy as our key accuracy metric as it best defines the ‘work’ we do e.g. an order with 5 lines and say 20 items represented 5 distinct bodies of work, we have to go to 5 locations, conduct 5 pick counts and 5 check counts so if we make an error (say we count 4 items not 5 items in a line) that’s a fail on the line so a 20% failure on that order. If we measured at an order level that would be a 100% failure we don’t believe that fairly represent the work (if we were to write a book and miss a chapter the entire book is not a failure), we just need to fix the missing chapter) and if we measured on an item basis that would be a 5% failure which we think is too lenient. Hence we measure on lines, to achieve our standard minimum 99.7% line accuracy, this allows 3 line errors over 1000 line pick/check work activities, which is what we have built the business on.
Our entire business has grown through word of mouth (we don’t employ salespeople) all of our clients come from competitors who promise the world but due to lack of robust systems and staff turnover are unable to maintain the high service levels we do. They all eventually get sick of the constant lapses in service that causes havoc in their business with sales and CS staff constantly dealing with grumpy clients and eventually seek us out. We don’t know of any 3PL that invests in their people/culture or systems to the level SCS does but we have to, to ensure consistently brilliant KPI service for our clients. And the proof of this is the KPI reporting which is why this is really the most important element of the 3PL relationship [the system that supports the KPI reporting and the actual KPI reporting results] and why I’m so excited to have this next piece, finally, fully automated.
Anyway please check out the vid, it’s a huge milestone for me to finally have this performance measurement live giving SCS customers complete confidence in our performance as it’s supported by full case management drill down on issues – stunning!
