Mind Mapping

1. Challenge:

I work as manager in a smart technologies company within which my job is to guarantee the  overall performance of the supply chain, on time deliveries and customer satisfaction. As  many of you would know, in the international trade and logistics business efficient delivery  and meeting the customer’s expectations is key for reliability, which is what customer most  identify with value adding for their business. Under this scenario, the main challenge for me  is to constantly find innovative new ways to improve our service and make our offering more  competitive.

2. Selection:

In order to find new ways of working and foster innovation, I have selected mind mapping as  a tool to organize the thoughts and ideas from my team and my own, and later transfer this  framework to a brainstorming session where we can explore in the “What If” stage different  approaches and possible solutions.

3. Application:

Below you will see one example where my team and I gathered virtually to discuss and create  a mind map on one single idea Proactive Quotation. The idea behind this was to move away  from a reactive way of working where we the different teams wait for the customers to  approach us (by phone or email), and instead start proactively anticipating the potential  customer needs and sending the quotations upfront, before even other competitors get to  make their offer.

The usage of the tool was simple, as we are currently (due to covid-19) working in a virtual  environment, I scheduled my team for a virtual session where we used a white board to map.  Open discussions, voting, etc, were also part of the process.

4. Insight:

The industry in which I work is highly defined by R&D and supply chain vs supply chain  competition. The mind map tool has allowed us to visually organize our ideas, generating  better remembrance and guaranteeing full understanding of the schemes and models being

developed. This of course, set the scene for a successful second stage where we brainstorm  our possibilities to implement improvement plans.

5. Approach:

What I have learned here and plan to do in the future, is to invest more time in the exploration  phase to gather more data and insights before jumping into the mind mapping tool. The more  studied and informed is the whole team, the better the mapping outcome would be.

