The EWU wanted to make their service more efficient, creating a near real time service, end to end.
The project was a total redesign of the service from beginning to end – the process and technology of their core purpose, reducing total response time from days to hours, and then minutes, constantly evolving to get as close to real time as possible
XXXXXXX DHL operate in over 50 countries, shipping cargo as small as a microchip and as big as a mobile heart clinic, across multiple countries and continents. They take care of the total logistical requirements, from collection, to storage to shipping to delivery and all the paperwork, legalities and requirements in between. But to get that service and enterprise organisation has to on-board as a customer and clarify their transport and logistics needs first.
Challenge:
DHL’s enterprise level customer (organisations, governments etc) onboarding process was costing them a lot of unnecessary time and money…and customers. It was complicated, slow, and there was a lot of manual effort and duplication. This not only made customers unhappy, but presented some of them with so much unnecessary complexity and delay that they took their business elsewhere.
The Service needed complete reevaluation and redesign to understand and realign it with its intended purpose and value. It was necessary to create an optimal and seamless end-to-end onboarding solution for their clients that automated as much of the activities as possible and allowed as much self-service as possible in a very complex and diverse business and service environment.
Approach:
I carried out Discovery & Research to gain insight into the business, technology, locations, users and cargo types. I interviewed stakeholders, shippers, warehouse managers, sales teams and clients to understand the process, pain points, logistics and scope of DHL’s client on-boarding.
I identified duplicated effort, processes and data. I uncovered all use cases and service processes, end-to-end, identifying many major delays, air gaps and inefficiencies.
I remodelled a new, optimised, service design, integrating automation and new client interfaces, whilst removing duplication and delays. I added the extraction of cargo dependent data in advance, allowing the warehouse and logistics engineers to plan for these in advance.
Outcomes:
I delivered a pre-discovery and full Discovery report, a Service Design blueprint (AS-IS and TO-BE) highlighting the comparative reductions in time, cost, duplication, delay and complexity at every step. and presented the insights and recommendation to the C-suite.
Recommendations helped the entire on-boarding team, from sales to logistics and support, and created an on-boarding model that could be rolled out internationally with measurable efficiency improvements.
Benefits:
Clients were able to make comprehensive sales requests without long delays.
Sales teams got more of the data they needed up front and could thus close deals quicker and more efficiently.
DHL’s services became more competitive.
Reduced on-boarding customer drop-off by 20% *
Increased sales completions by 15% *
Reduced the on-boarding process time by 40%
Reduced the on-boarding work/data duplication 50%
Reduced on-boarding cost by 10%
*customer supplied data