Transitioning to KAM in the public sector
The Electricity and Construction Industry Training Board is tasked with increasing competence within the Engineering Construction Industry, from apprentices through to technicians and managers. Its key customers are companies and contractors who employ trained people, but when the Board decided to embark on KAM, people inside the organization were not even all agreed about who the cus- tomers were: the Government, the employers, or the engineers and apprentices. The organization took some time to explore and under- stand KAM, and came to the conclusion that it was the right way to achieve the change of orientation and approach it wanted.
ECITB appointed three KAM champions as a core team to drive the programme and, after three years, KAM had been implemented, customer satisfaction was up and employee engagement was up. The Board rated the programme as a great success in bridging the gap, not uncommon between public institutions and commercial businesses, which had existed between the organization and many of its customer companies. The next stage on the journey was to increase the number of customers managed through account plans and roll out a CRM system that would follow the new way of work- ing. It had taken some time to win ‘hearts and minds’ to KAM but progress, initially frustratingly slow, was now accelerating.
Any company that is complacent will be quickly overtaken.
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professionals. Lean supply involves the study of the entire supply flow from raw materials to consumer as an integrated whole.
In theory, effective supply flow is an absolute. In practice, companies just have to keep applying continuous improvement to be leaner than the competition. Adopting an approach in which the supplier and cus- tomer are joint guardians of the value in transit is vital. Examination of the value in transit demands that both the supplier and customer open their ‘books’ and facilitate two-way assessment in order to optimize performance. There should be no blame and excuses.
Lean supply practice also lends itself to sharing some costs critical to mutual success. Joint research and development, joint merchandizing, integrated logistic and electronic data interchange (EDI) are just a few examples of the opportunities available for making things happen better, cheaper and faster.