Summary
The view from the top of business. Presented by Evan Davis, The Bottom Line cuts through confusion, statistics and spin to present a clearer view of the business world, through discussion with people running leading and emerging companies.
Evan and a panel of guests from the worlds of electronic components, online groceries and information technology discuss the exacting science of business logistics.
The panel also discusses customer service. Just how high should a company aim in trying to satisfy its consumers?
Evan is joined in the studio by Tim Steiner, co-founder and chief executive of online supermarket Ocado; Nick Wilson, managing director of Hewlett-Packard UK; Ian Mason, chief executive of electronic components company Electrocomponents.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a download from the BBC. |
| 0:02.6 | This edition of The Bottom Line, Radio 4's Business Discussion Program, |
| 0:06.7 | was first broadcast on the 14th of October 2010. |
| 0:10.0 | Here's Evan Davis. |
| 0:11.7 | Hello and welcome to the bottom line. |
| 0:13.8 | Now, to many, logistics is just a fancy word to describe the activity of driving a lorry. |
| 0:19.2 | And of course it is, but it's so much more as well. |
| 0:22.9 | Organising those lorries and what's in them is one of the most sophisticated activities of a modern |
| 0:28.1 | business. We'll be finding out what it consists of. And today we'll also talk about customer service. |
| 0:34.4 | How high should a company aim at satisfying each and every client? But before we do that, |
| 0:40.6 | let's spend a few minutes meeting each of my three guests. And first, Tim Steiner, who's the co-founder |
| 0:46.9 | and chief executive of the online supermarket, Akado. Welcome, Tim. We're going to discuss your |
| 0:53.9 | operation, obviously, when we talk about logistics |
| 0:55.7 | in a minute. But just give us a sense of the scale of the number of items you deliver. |
| 1:00.9 | On a busy day now, we'll deliver just over 1.05 million items to about 19.5,000 customers. |
| 1:09.1 | Now, a lot of people had tried this before Akado came along, right? |
| 1:13.9 | I mean, famously, there was web van in the United States, one of the early dot-com pioneers, built a huge |
| 1:19.5 | warehouse, never got it off the ground. What made you think you could make a grocery business online? |
| 1:26.2 | The grocery market is enormous. |
| 1:27.7 | It's nearly 150 billion pounds in the UK. |
| 1:30.7 | And so a lot of the early online pioneers were building businesses that needed 90% of the market to move online. |
| 1:36.2 | They needed to have a first mover advantage as they talked about it and get 80% market share. |
... |
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