I Came, I Saw, I Left
1676 days agoOne of my friend had started a business to supply PCs and Notebooks to his customers and as I am currently jobless now, he asked me to go check out one of his suppliers. He wanted to see how well they perform. His business rely on speed and availability of parts in order to provide support to his clients and to supply whatever IT parts they need. Speed, is the most crucial part of his entire operation. And now, the market for supplying desktops and notebooks is very competitive and cut-throat. There are like hundreds of suppliers out there, all varying for the same piece of pie. So let’s say a customer wants a printer or wants his PC repaired fast, you will have to do it or else they will go to someone else.
So I went to one of his supplier’s place and I was shocked. The place was in a mess. And I mean everything. There is no proper procedure to get stocks and supply, no proper holding place for urgent requests, no real filing system for documents, no proper workflow, no proper tracking system, no real return policy, no nothing. Worse, they do everything manually. There isn’t a computerized system which is ironic for a supplier selling IT products. Let’s say you order something, it can be handled by several persons. And the steps for fulfilling that order is not fixed and thus with so many people stirring the pot, that order may get lose somewhere. From what I heard, that has happened pretty often too.
And with these kind of problems, I told my friend that it could be problematic for him to have them as his supplier. He could have a lot of pissed off customers in his hands in no time. Delays and mistakes (which in my opinion is bound to happen frequently) is definitely not what he wants from his suppliers.
Shocking right? And very disappointing too. The supplier had distributorship of a number of IT products in Singapore. Although it is not a huge company, it is quite significant as well. I wonder how much businesses have they lost due to their poor business practices?
