Strength Through Structure

Speedboard is pleased to announce that it has created dedicated customer teams as part of its strategy to become CEM partner-of-choice for any customer seeking a professional, efficient and value-added service.  This organisational change will help ensure that Speedboard continues to be able to meet its customers’ requirements – and support its growth – in ever-demanding markets.

How are the teams structured?

Each team has a Senior Account Manager, an Account Manager, a Production Engineer and a Buyer and is responsible for supporting a number of customers.  The allocation of customers to a team is based on a variety of factors such as product complexity, assembly complexity and whether or not box-build (final assembly) is required. Or, to put it another way, each customer has been placed in the most appropriate team for their current and future manufacturing requirements.

Advantages of this setup

The team members physically sit together, which has numerous advantages. For instance, each Production Engineer can focus on customer engineering activities and gains, first hand, a detailed understanding of any specific requirements. Similarly, having a dedicated Buyer on the team means information regarding component lead times, obsolescence issues and last time buys is more readily available. The Buyer is also responsible for managing supplier Kanban and buffer agreements.

The Account Manager and Senior Account Manager are both points of contact for the customer and, between them, they provide continuity of support in the event of absence. Also, whilst each team member reports to his or her respective Line Manager for functional direction, it is the responsibility of the Account Manager to ensure the team meets the day-to-day and ongoing strategic requirements of each customer.

Result

In summary, and unlike most CEMs, we now have a number of dedicated, focused and highly proactive multi-disciplined Customer Teams providing the best possible level of support, whilst respecting that each customer has unique requirements.