How a Cummins Employee Turbocharged the Process to Order Replacement Turbo Parts

When customer feedback pointed to an inadequate process for ordering replacement turbo parts, Gerben Van De Biezen, Regional Sales Manager in Europe, formed a team to streamline the process.

The Net Promoter System (NPS) showed that Cummins customers felt their requests for Vehicle Off Road (VOR) orders weren’t being answered with enough urgency; they expected an estimate on lead-time and cost within 30 minutes of their request, but weren’t getting it.

Gerben’s improvement project directly addressed the pain customers were facing by streamlining the process globally so that it was not only improved to meet customer expectations, but that every customer could feel the impact.

Since the project’s close…

• Employees better understand the importance of these services to our customers
• The new VOR process has been documented and shared with customers to align both internal and external expectations
• Cummins Turbo Technologies (CTT) guarantees a certain delivery performance for which they charge a service fee. If CTT doesn’t adhere to the promised lead-time, the charge will now be cancelled
• CTT only charges its customers when orders are shipped within 24 hours after the order is received

Almost immediately after communicating these changes to customers, they started coming back with positive responses. One distributor also said the new process has reached, “the level of service on VOR [they] used to have many years ago.”

As a result of this turnaround, Gerben won the 2014 Components Business NPS Improvement Award from Cummins.