Reflection – Learning launch

Challenge

I lead the shipping department of an industry engaged in international export of its products. A customer  wanted to conclude an interesting sales opportunity for our company to a country with a port that is  extremely congested (busy) all over the year, this entails long waiting times for the ships to berth to that  port and cause significant detention penalties to our company, which will ultimately kill any profit margins  of this sale. Hence, the challenge was to deliver the material to that port without incurring penalties.

Selection

Finding a possible solution would be a real wow as it would deliver to customers what they need, we could  make it and the economic sustains it, hence I selected the learning launch tool (that I learned during the  design thinking for innovation lectures – Module 4).

I selected three members of my team to: a) interview our customer to understand their needs in terms of  material size requirement, preferences, tonnage per shipment, hiring the vessel themselves and chances  of accepting the delivery to a different port in the same country; b) a complete analysis to the country/port  whereas material should be delivered in terms of average waiting time to berth, possible agreements on  priorities in berthing, existence of shipping lines that have private berths or priority in berthing, existence  of shipping lines that could accept bearing the waiting costs without back charging that to our company  and the availability of an alternative close port to the one selected by the customer; c) discuss with our  sales team to understand whether any sort of budget that could be arranged to cover eventual penalties.  The established timeframe was one week.

Application

After obtaining all the necessary data and deeply analyzed it, it was evident that loading by cargo ship was  not a recommended solution as it will result in unsupported heavy penalty disbursement to our company.  We started generating ideas among which was containers solution, as we realized from the data collected  that material can fit into a container.

We surfaced various assumptions: a) customer acceptance of containers shipment, b) acceptance to  receive containers at a one specific of the three terminals of the required port, c) daily withdrawal capacity  of the customer, d) sales team acceptance of the containers trade. I tested the assumptions and they  revealed more likely true as the idea seemed feasible but met a new challenge as the customer did not  want to receive the material in containers because they do not have expertise in stripping the containers,  though, customer would have accepted this solution at the condition of delivering the material stripped  out from the containers and placed as bulk material at the storage yard in the port.

Among the data we collected were various shipping agents that we approached immediately and found  out that some of them could arrange for this operation at the destination port. We analyzed the costs  from end to end including this operation and found out that final cost is lower than the dedicated logistics  budget. So I decided, after obtaining the approval of the customer to do a small experiment of a trial

shipment of 10 containers (250 tons) that revealed extremely successful. Today, we have a contract to  export to that country over than 80,000 tons yearly utilizing this new idea.

Insight

It is extremely rewarding to see your company achieving results because of ideas that you launched and  realized allowing you to reach the wow area. The design thinking tools are extremely helpful in creating a  completely structured method that allows you to approach any challenge objectively, drill down to the  essence, search higher ground, continue asking yourself questions of what you know, what you don’t  know, what you need to know, developing by that an ability to see and do what others don’t or avoid to.

Approach

I have elected to use this tool (learning launch) because it seemed to me the most appropriate for this  subject, whereas there are customer needs, company ability to do something and the economy sustained  it. As alternative approach, the mind mapping (idea generation – Module 3) could eventually do but I felt  that it does not address the whole subject, like the learning launch.

