Fundamentals of Logistics, Supply Chain & Customer Service

Explore how supply chain management keeps goods available daily by managing suppliers and turning supplies into products. Build reliable processes and strong supplier relationships to deliver finished goods to customers.

Learn to map procurement, operations, and logistics into a modern, integrated supply chain that delivers the right item to the right place at the right time.

Profit equals revenue minus cost, and supply chains must drive revenue by delivering great products while eliminating waste, guided by cost, quality, speed, and flexibility.

Explore inventory management through a water flow analogy, balancing raw materials, work in process, and finished goods to meet demand while controlling costs and mitigating risks.

Choose suppliers who enhance customer happiness by ensuring consistent, high-quality ingredients and reliable production. Build collaborative, scorecard-driven buyer-supplier relationships that foster innovation and a stronger supply chain.

Explore how design, marketing, and manufacturing choices interact in new product development, using a paper airplane exercise to show how prototypes, pricing, production, and quality shape outcomes.

Examine how location choices affect costs, logistics, and opportunities, from home selection to offshore manufacturing, highlighting infrastructure, suppliers, logistics partners, and customer proximity.

Explore outsourcing decisions through contract manufacturers, balancing design, processes, and reliability with cost, quality, and long-term logistics and quality control.

Explore how packaging, documentation, insurance, and transport modes shape global logistics, from planograms and pallets to customs and final delivery, revealing what logisticians manage.

Standardized shipping containers, 20 or 40 feet long, enable fast, safer movement from truck to rail to ship in TEUs, while reefers control temperature, humidity, and oxygen to protect perishables.

Explore the four major supply chain modes—trucks, rails, ships, and airplanes—and learn how cost, speed, packaging, and containerization influence cargo decisions and freight forwarders' roles in global transport.

Discover how distribution centers replace traditional warehouses by rapid in-and-out inventory under 48 hours, enable consolidation and postponement, and optimize last-mile delivery through full trucks and hub-like networks.

Explore how supply chain components work together like a jazz ensemble, coordinating purchasing, operations, and logistics through trust, communication, and data sharing to tame the bullwhip effect.

Compare push and pull supply chain strategies and analyze postponement as a blend of both. Explore how push yields speed and economies of scale, while pull offers customization and quality.

Develop goals and empower educated employees to tackle surprises, lean out clutter in life and company processes, and seize opportunities in lean supply chains.

Explore how global supply chains function as the organization’s muscles and bones, integrating global marketing, international finance, ethics, audits, and supplier management to deliver responsible products worldwide.

Build a sustainable, legally compliant supply chain by reducing waste, recycling packaging, reusing pallets, and embracing efficient practices for humanitarian relief and disaster response.

Develop a step-by-step customer service strategy that centers on meeting and knowing customers, improving interactions, and delivering great experiences that give your organization the edge.

Define a customer service strategy as a plan of action aligning with your organization's vision to guide daily decisions and actions, mirroring Disney's four standards: safety, courtesy, show, and efficiency.

A strong customer service strategy aligns evolving expectations, unlocks efficiency and loyalty, and reveals strategic value by guiding decisions and informing every interaction.

Identify and meet customer expectations to build an effective customer service strategy, guided by ICMI's 10 expectations across accessible channels and tangibles that shape perceptions.

Identify five common pitfalls in customer service strategy, from overly complex plans to lack of a plan, and ensure organization-wide alignment that connects roles to outcomes.

Adopt an action-oriented customer service strategy that informs every decision, gains top-management support, and drives cross-functional improvements, like FedEx's Purple Promise, to deliver measurable results.

Develop a vision-driven customer service strategy with seven components, apply the big three (people, processes, technology), and implement a ten-component customer access plan to guide investments and decisions.

Establish a shared vision and shape a supporting customer access strategy, then address the big three, people, processes, and technology, through five areas: workforce, compensation, structure, culture, and metrics.

Define and implement effective processes that support your customer service vision, focusing on major processes like resource planning, quality management, measuring performance, customer relationships, and leveraging feedback.

Explore how technology and innovation shape customer service strategy with cloud-based tools, omnichannel access, artificial intelligence, and metrics to drive enhanced customer experiences.

Guide decisions and direction by applying customer service strategy in planning meetings. Make strategy visible to employees and business partners, and use it to prioritize initiatives and support change management.

Assign an owner to review and update the customer service strategy biannually to stay current. Ensure understanding, keep the format simple and inspiring, and onboard new employees.

Define quality as the attributes of a product or service and establish standards from customer expectations, mission and values, and stakeholder input to ensure brand-aligned, consistent service.

Understand how service quality rests on the customer's perception of meeting expectations, which continuously shift due to innovation; review the 10 expectations and tangibles shaping multi-channel experiences.

Explore how to set effective quality standards in customer service by aligning people, processes, and technologies with customer expectations and cost considerations.

Create effective quality standards for customer service staff by ensuring they flow from mission, vision and values, are within individuals' control, and balance foundation and finesse criteria for consistent service.

Develop methods to assess and measure service interactions using observations, role-plays, customer feedback, surveys, and analytics, then implement easy, contextual scoring to drive coaching and improve agent performance.

Master four levels of calibration to align interpretation and coaching across quality standards. Apply the SAFE model—summarize, ask, formulate, express—plus customer input to drive consistent performance and coaching.

Treat customer service as a process within an organization, a system of causes that shapes quality, guiding improvement with plan, do, check, act and aligned standards.

Define seven operational quality standards to optimize service, covering workload forecasting, resource planning, wait times, interaction quality, employee engagement, loyalty, and strategic value from shared insights.

Establish an overall measure by comparing CSAT, net promoter score, and customer effort score. Weigh their advantages and limitations, align with quality standards, and foster a customer-focused culture and engagement.