Innovation Arises From Seeing the Customer's Need Before They Do

Innovation means more than providing products and services that meet your needs. It means anticipating your needs and finding ways to meet them.

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Swagelok Northern California's Value Proposition

Rod Fallow, president of Swagelok Northern California, has been sharing more of his insights on Dirk Beveridge's "Innovate for the Future" podcast. The first installment in the five-part series looked at Swagelok Northern California's vision. The second got into the details of how we define our values.

In this episode, Fallow talks about Swagelok Northern California's value proposition.

Beveridge's own research shows that many distributors are caught in a world of sameness. Neither their employees nor their customers can give a consistent, solid answer as to why anyone should buy from that particular company.

A lot of that is due to inertia, Fallow says. A company finds a formula for success and never sees any reason to change. At Swagelok Northern California, we take a different approach.

Focus on the customer

"I think focusing on the customer is where real innovation starts," Fallow says. "I think deeply understanding the customer and their needs, to the point where we can start to see what they need before they do, is true innovation."

How do we do that? "We engage a large part of the organization with the customer. We get out into the shop. We go deep into a customer’s location. We work with the receiving people," he says. It's not just the sales staff getting out and shaking hands. It can also be someone from the warehouse, a logistics person, the director of operations, and Fallow likes to get out as well.

One technique is to follow an order through the customer's system. "We 'staple' ourselves to an order and walk through that process to try to understand what the pain points are," Fallow says. "Oftentimes we can see solutions that the customer didn't even know were available, so we can eliminate a step." That might be something we can automate, such as providing information to them in advance. Or we might look for a way to roll three transactions into one. We look for any way we can reduce costs and save time, from the quoting phase through design and receiving, all the way through to maintenance.

"That whole process is always very eye-opening for everyone in the process. It really helps us to understand what the customer is going through," Fallow says. "Ideally, that translates into not just a solution for that customer, but we can scale that across the network. So we've developed the solution once, but now it applies to lots of people."

Beyond the job description

Swagelok Northern California also develops tools and solutions that we can put into play for our customers. Our staff is free to go beyond their job descriptions to solve problems. Our customers may know how to design their own systems and operate them, but they are not likely to be experts on the individual Swagelok components and how they all go together.

"There's rarely a design that we look at that we can't improve on," Fallow says, "Use fewer pieces, get the same job done with a less expensive component, select the part that's more readily available, one that's a standard, not something unique."

Getting on the front end of the process and working with the customer's engineers means they'll do it the best way from the start, instead of having to iron out the kinks later.

"We're in the customer satisfaction business," Fallow says. "We satisfy customers by helping them reduce costs, improve productivity, increase throughput."

Fallow gives even more insights into the workings of Swagelok Northern California, including a description of a new tool, the Product Wizard, which helps our customer service staff do a better job for our customers.

Click this link to listen to the full, 30-minute interview.

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