Today, companies are looking down stream to their clients and up-stream to their vendors and using technology to remove the quarters and dollars in unnecessary costs associated with these external relationships. AES's productivity has shot up since it made those technological, cost saving enhancements at the customer interface. On a busy day the company can ship 600 to 700 packages. Incoming phone calls to inquire about prices, place orders, and get status updates were chewing up huge amounts of staff time. Now, all those functions are handled via AES's web site, which attracts thousands of visits and hundreds of orders each week.
Sales are up considerably, but our head count is the same.
And our phone bill for those 800-number and collect calls is way down. But not many mid-sized companies are nearly as technologically accommodating to their clients, which are often large corporations. The electronic purchase orders they receive do not trigger a series of automated events among the company and its client and vendors. The approach of most progressive companies today is to work with their smaller, strategic vendors to get inefficiencies out of the supply chain. The Net allows the large, client companies to be more flexible.