Shireen Garrison:
Welcome to Smart Supply Chain, a podcast for supply chain professionals who think and work smarter.
I’m your host, Shereen Garrison, and I’m here with my sister in supply chain, Sarah Garrison. Hey, Sarah.
Sarah Garrison:
Hi, Shireen.
Well, we’re at our third installment in our onboarding series.
In our first session, we talked about the importance of relationships and planning and onboarding.
Shireen:
Yes, and then in our second session, we met with some experts on our teams.
They talked about things like meeting customers where they are, about the expertise that we can provide them to guide our customers to go the right direction, and also supporting them to meet their goals.
So while we’re making sure that the quality assurance is there throughout, we’re also really trying to position our customers and our clients for success.
Sarah:
Yeah, it’s all been really interesting. So how are we going to round out our series on onboarding?
Shireen:
Well, I’m going to chat with Hannah Kain, who is our founder and CEO at ALOM, and I’m going to ask her about her guiding vision for the company and what she thinks about onboarding. What’s her philosophy? What’s her approach? Why is it important?
So, let’s jump in.
I am here now with Hannah Kain, our CEO and President of ALOM. Hannah, welcome.
Hannah Kain:
Thank you. I’m glad to be here.
Shireen:
We are glad you were here as well.
I have been talking to everybody on your teams about what we do at ALOM around onboarding and what roles do people play, what roles do the different groups play in terms of bringing on new clients and what we do.
I mean, since I’ve been at ALOM there, you are very involved in everything that’s happening with all of our new client onboarding. So, tell me a little bit about, you know, your philosophy and what makes ALOM a little bit different than other examples that you’ve seen in terms of new client onboarding?
Hannah:
Well, it really starts with my personal experience and commitment, right?
So, when you go into a shop, and you’ve probably tried that, we have all tried this, right? We go into a shop and there’s somebody who doesn’t know how to operate a cash register, and they don’t know anything about anything. It’s really irritating.
And as I’ve been standing there in line, steaming as we sort of gradually do when we get bad service, right? I decided that we were never going to experiment on the customers.
But the idea is that the customers have a great experience from day one. And one big area of concern for me, and also joy for me, is that all customers place so much faith in us.
So, we touch their customers. And in order for us to do that, we cannot fail. We need to deliver perfectly from day one. And so that has been my commitment, and that’s why we have so much focus on the onboarding.
And I think when you look at our methodology, it really starts with the strategic account managers and the sales group. And so, the strategic account managers, as you well know, as the leader of the group, have a tremendous background and they sit down and try to understand all the stakeholders and what really needs, what each stakeholder within a company needs.
And one differentiator is when most companies are being onboarded with a company that’s a competitor to ALOM, very few would ask, what does your accounting the people need? What do they need in finance? Which type of reporting do they need? What’s the output that you need seen from a sustainability standpoint? Those type of things where we know that there are stakeholders in most corporations, you have got stakeholders.
People are very focused on safety of suppliers, people are very focused on sustainability or on other areas, but also for financial reporting, as we are holding inventory for our customers, or as we are certainly keeping track of revenue generating activities, it’s super important for the finance group to know what we are doing and have accurate reporting.
And so we ask those questions upfront. And so that alignment between ALOM and the new customer, I think is very critical and understanding each of those aspects and then getting them documented.
Shireen:
I think it’s so important at the beginning to just really understand what all those requirements are for sure and then putting together a plan to be able to address those.
Although we were talking earlier, I was talking with Taylor Brown, who is leading our onboarding activities. And she came up with an analogy after we were done recording that she said, you know, onboarding can sometimes be like a kitchen with everybody where everybody wants to be the head chef and they want to bring their own recipe and do it their own way.
And I thought, yeah, that’s very accurate that each group, you know, within a client’s space definitely wants to have their voices heard and make sure that it’s happening the way that they want it to happen. But you have to boil that all down and get everybody on the same page so that…very successful together in partnership.
Hannah:
And it’s perfectly possible to satisfy everybody. And I think it really starts with understanding what they need. So, there’s a lot of fear in getting a new supplier on board. And that’s understandable, right?
Again, we are holding the key to the kingdom in the sense that if we don’t ship and if we don’t ship on time, not only is there no revenue being generated, but that can also be dissatisfaction coming out of that.
And so for us, it’s very important that we really perform, but it’s certainly important, extremely important for our customers, right? And so that fear comes up, I think, throughout onboarding, and it may feel like everybody’s pulling in the same direction.
And this is where your team is so brilliant in the way they make everybody aligned around, okay, what is it really we want?
You know, one of my favorite stories, because we’ve onboarded, of course, a lot of customers over 28 years, right? So, one of my favorite stories was the fear that was within a public company we were onboarding. The person who was the head person in charge of the relationship said, I am going to be there all day on the quarter end. And you know, I want to see what’s going on. I want to understand and you know, and you need to ship on time. And she was very excited about, you know, being really in control.
So, but I understand that fear. And so that’s also part of the onboarding is understanding that there’s some concern and fear. And certainly, I mean, you know, if there’s success and that’s what we always work towards and fortunately achieve. If there’s a, when there’s success, then the thing just goes away. But when there’s a failure, right, you know, that’s where you have a big, big issue, right?
Because of the impact it has and the visibility within the organization. And so it’s very critical to drive towards that success and do the planning as you spoke about it, maybe sometimes do a multi-phased approach.
And then the other area I believe is key to success is also understand the stakeholders outside the company. So that could be the end users. It could be the people receiving the shipments.
So, let’s say we ship into a trade show. It’s a totally different experience than if we ship to a home. What is the fear, you know, the criticality of the shipments, et cetera.
We had another customer we onboarded and their big issue was that the salespeople really didn’t trust that the packages would arrive in time.
And they went out and did big training sessions and the training materials and everything needed to be there on time. And they would travel for this, right? And then they got concerned that the shipment would not be there, they would show up and they would have traveled and people would sit there in the classroom, but the materials were not there.
So, they had decided that they wanted to ship everything FedEx overnight. Now this was really expensive, right?
Shireen:
I understand.
Hannah:
And there were big shipments here. And so we went in and we said, okay, let’s not change anything. So we were running for a couple of weeks and of course we shipped everything 100% on time. And in fact, some of the shipments got lost with the recipient because now the staff was sitting there for a very long time waiting for the trainer to show up.
And then we started saying, okay, now you can no longer place an order that goes overnight except in extraordinary circumstances.
And we cut the freight down tremendously, right? So, we went from FedEx overnight to all of a sudden being able to ship around and get everything out and get it situated real-time and ship based on delivery date.
And so understanding that there was that fear, working around that fear, creating that confidence, and then going to that next step was just critical.
Shireen:
Stepping ahead of the problem and trying to figure out what things we can avoid, what things we can change, I think is absolutely critical.
Hannah, in your many, many years of supply chain experience, what do you think is the greatest success in terms of onboarding and why is it so important to you?
Hannah:
It’s so important to me because I’m thinking about the end user, the customer, not just our customer, not just the stakeholders within the customer or outside the customer, but also the person receiving that. The shipment. It’s critical that we perform flawlessly over to them.
I’m a firm believer in collaboration. Collaboration is one of ALOM’s core values. And it is because we know that in order to create success, we need to get everybody to work together.
And we need to stand like a conductor with an orchestra that’s never worked to play a piece of music together before. Because when we onboard, we have not played with the other players within our customer.
And there’s, as I said, there are internal and external stakeholders. And so we are orchestrating all of this and we are live from day one. So sometimes we can do some testing and we certainly do where we can, but it’s not always possible. And so that’s really important to get everybody aligned and get everybody positioned and playing from the same sheet of music, right?
And also to understand how excited the ALOM team is about performing for our customers.
So within the team, there’s also fear of failure and joy of success. And so understanding that and getting that orchestrated internally such that everybody goes to the task with how do we plan for success and how do we do risk mitigation such that we take into account all the things that could go wrong and we mitigate for them, either eliminate them or we have a plan for fast stepping in if something happens last minute.
And so thinking through the entire process is critical and it’s fortunate that we’ve done it so many times because we have a lot of muscle in this area.
Shireen:
A lot of experience and one of my favorite things about the ALOM team is collaboration amongst the team is so strong and we’re all here to make sure that things are successful. And it shows every day that the culture that you’ve driven through the team is very, very strong. It’s one of the greatest things about our company, I think.
Hannah, thank you so much for your time today. I appreciate you coming up to my onboarding podcast and closing us out. nSo, we’ll see you at the next onboarding.
Hannah:
Sounds good. Happy onboarding!
Shireen:
Thanks, Hannah. That was a great discussion with Hannah Kain. I loved hearing about her philosophy of onboarding, in particular, just the importance of building a great relationship with your clients. And also thinking about their clients, that end customer who’s being impacted by the work that we do and that we set up with our clients.
Very important to get it right to make sure that we’re really good partners with our clientele.
Sarah:
Yeah, and the other thing that made me think about is really making sure that we know how we’re defining success. So, what does success look like for the client and how are we measuring and making sure that we’re all aligned to those goals?
I mean, at the end of the day, onboarding is something new and it’s change and that is always scary. The focus and the disciplines that’s required to do that onboarding is really important and then having the flexibility to expect the unexpected and together to create solutions.
I really enjoyed these conversations and I’m ready for our new clients on board.
Shireen:
Absolutely. We’re all ready when you are. Thanks everyone.
We’re the Garrison sisters. Catch you next time on Smart Supply Chain or check us out anytime at alom.com.
