Manufacturing Magazine April 2018 | Page 92

NOKIA
mentality in the organisation that shows we are an important part of what the customer is seeing in their daily life . We used to be in the trenches of the back office but now we ’ re more involved from the beginning of the opportunity in order to create the best possible customer experience .”
From top to bottom , customer needs are driving decisions at Nokia . But as each customer has their own unique demands , Giloth describes how the Finnish company has worked to understand and cluster its customers into segments so that it can deliver the things that really matter to them .
“ Some customers want to have fast delivery , but they are not really price-sensitive ,” Giloth says . “ Others are looking at the price only , but the supply chain related KPIs are not that important . You need to really understand the different KPIs and what your customers want . Our customers have completely different requirements in terms of throughput , reactiveness and on-time delivery so we need to understand the requests of the customer and segment our supply chain towards it .”
However , a customer segmented supply chain is just the start , Giloth says . “ You also have to create customer intimacy , to really talk with your customers , and be exposed to the customers .
“ Therefore , we have people like Bo in the regions being more and more connected with Nokia customers , rather than it being a very back-ended function . On top of that , you need to design your processes and your tools to make it easy for customers to use . Your product configuration can be cumbersome , or it can be Amazon-like . If the customer has a good feel of that user interface , that ’ s added value in itself .”
True digital transformation Often , ‘ digitisation ’ can seem like just another buzzword ; a few syllables that have saturated business press releases worldwide . However , Nokia has proven it can be more than just on-trend lingo . Over the
92 April 2018