How consumer priorities impact your supply chain
by Jeffrey Vail - Chief Marketing Officer, Quintiq

Happy customers are the key to success. It’s the first and more persistent rule of business. In the world of supply chains that used to mean making sure you had supplies to make and deliver a product, in full and on time. But that’s not enough anymore.

Customer expectations have changed. They’ve been helped along by major missteps and enabled by technology. The 21st century has seen more than its fair share of supply chain related scandals. Tainted milk in China, Nike child labor, worker abuse and suicides at Foxconn Technology (assembling Apple products), and BP’s Gulf oil spill – each of these incidents shed light on a major company’s supply chain failures. And the result was that an overwhelming number of buyers stop buying.

Even if products don’t make headlines, the public can easily find out a great deal about what they buy. Consumers can interact on social channels, read reviews, and conduct their own research. Vani Hari, an American blogger, has brought about changes with petitions about ingredients in everything from chicken sandwiches to bread, demonstrating that even a single voice can make a huge difference. Everyone has this opportunity today – to research, write a petition about, or review a product.

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