MYM&M’s® Case Study - Operations

Directed Sales and Distribution (S&D) changes to scale from $500k to $80M.

Tim led S&D operations from 2006 to 2008. His efforts and leadership eliminated bottlenecks, failure points, and error-increasing (inherited) best practices. By reducing cost to serve from 50% of revenue to 3% of revenue he provided significant impact to the better-than-expected profitability during scale-up.

Core Actions:

  • Owned and executed data governance from architecture, queries, through analysis.

    • Out-of-the-box reporting from vendor wouldn’t work, created new DataMart and views as reliable source.

    • Decoded non-4NF source data represented as 4NF in warehouse to decipher true order statuses.

    • Identified and corrected false financial and marketing revenue historical record to capture true value.

    • Tested and modelled elements in MDX OLAP front end prior to migrating to mart logic for efficiency.

  • Increased order flow and accuracy from 55% On-Time & Complete to 99.97% while reducing order lead time from 3 weeks to one week.

    • Deconstructed Pick Pack & Ship best practices to accommodate single SKU, infinite variation product verification model.

    • Re-engineered all CPG Six Sigma Repetitive manufacturing processes to accommodate our D2C discreet manufacturing structure.

    • Eliminated all SOPs that interfered with getting the next order due to be the next one worked on.

    • Initiated and sold an expedited, order by 3pm, get it tomorrow rush process.

  • Created visibility and accountability to order pipeline, eliminating sludge and due date apathy.

Why This Matters …

This is the core to the delivery structure I build. My term “operational sludge” was the name we had given to the orders that get stuck and don’t move. Regardless of task or industry, without proper controls in place to attack sludge it builds quickly and erodes customer satisfaction and makes revenue harder to retain.

  • Finance was pushing for eliminating the money back guarantee instead of the hard work of fixing the failure rate.

  • Supply wanted fastest and easiest process for each work area, regardless of impact on customer order accuracy.

  • Senior leadership was uncomfortable with walking away from established bets practices for other delivery models.

  • Leadership severely misjudged the effort required to gain control of this and how much less was required after winning.

When Tim talks about having to reframe the narrative and belief system, he knows what he is talking about. These were high leverage conversations that required standing up to “this is how we do this” beliefs that didn’t apply in this unique value proposition. Finding and socializing data is critical. Understanding why people buy your product is foundational.