Aiming to satisfy our customers continuously

Interview with Bernard Boulet, Global Supply Chain & Data Quality Director

As we said last year, we now have extensive management systems in place to meet our customers’ expectations, related to quality, environmental, Health & Safety and wider Corporate Responsibility issues.

With solid foundations established in 2006, our supply chain network has been able to confront many challenges. We set up the supply chain program last year with the principal aim of ensuring we deliver products to our customers on time.

We are pleased to announce the following results:

In 2006, we halved the percentage of products delivered to our customers late (not on time), when at the same time we increased by 5% orders with an ST-committed delivery date equal to our customers’ requested date.

From now on, we will use the following two indicators to track how we are doing in terms of getting our products to our customers on time.

• Reduction of delivery delays (evolution per quarter; percentage reduction in volume)
• ST-committed delivery date equal to customer request (in volume);
  (5% improvement achieved in 2006)

So how did we achieve these results?

• First, we involved every function in our supply chain: purchasing, manufacturing, logistics, product groups and sales - and created new indicators and measurements for the contribution of each function in reaching our target. Each function is now monitoring those indicators regularly.
• Second, we improved our ‘Just in time’ scores, we also introduced more effective ways of prioritizing, by showing our delivery commitments to our customers in our production plans.
• Finally, we assessed and amended any rules, planning systems and processes that could cause delays.

In 2007, we intend to keep working on this key issue, to continuously improve our commitment to our customers, which is one of the cornerstones of our Sustainable Excellence approach.

Reduction of delivery delays