Voseko Alumni Lecture by bpost
In recent years, VOSEKO, the Alumni Association of the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration at Ghent University (www.voseko.be), has become known for its inspiring lectures. Under its motto “we link economic thinking”, they invite people from both academia and industry to cover a wide array of topics going from macro-economic theories to innovative logistics applications. This is a guest blog post by Dauwe Vercamer (@DauweVercamer) about their latest lecture.
Oct. 24, “Marketer of the year” (in Belgium), Dirk Oosterlinck (@dirkoosterlinck, see picture above) and his colleague Bernard Van Causenbroeck presented an interesting case study as a Voseko Lecture. Both speakers are senior managers at bpost, Belgium’s national postal service. They came to discuss how they are able to continually innovate in a globalized and highly competitive environment.
Thursday 24 October 2013
After the introduction by the president of the executive committee of Voseko, Arne De Keyser (see picture above left), Bernard (Director Vision 2020 bpost, see picture above right) started his talk with some impressive numbers. For example all mail carriers together cover about 715 000 km every day (just in tiny Belgium)! Then, he talked about how innovation has always been part of the company’s DNA and how In darker times they even experimented with “rocket post”.
Next, he highlighted the operational effectiveness of the company and how process innovations ensured a decrease in preparation time of the mail carriers. This gives them more time for the actual deliveries. Furthermore, he also showed how centralizing their distribution centers enabled them to reduce costs. As a funny anecdote, he showed how the most efficient way to send a letter from Bruges with destination Bruges is via Brussels and Ghent. All of this proves that shifting from an intuition-driven to a data-driven culture helps in turning a loss-making division into a profit center.
Then, Dirk took over to discuss some of the newer strategies they were pursuing to drive growth for the next years. One of them is a personalized greeting card you can send from your smartphone and that is delivered as a real letter rather than as an email.
He further elaborated on a new service they are rolling out. It is a shopping solution that lets customers buy from a wide array of shops (groceries, clothes, sports gear, …) and then bundles all of their purchases together and delivers it at their doorstep at an agreed upon hour. I am not sure whether the Belgian market is ready for this kind of solution, but I do believe it is the right way to go.
He ended his talk with a summary of ‘lessons learned’ where he mentioned the importance of communication and transparency toward your employees. Innovation comes easily when everybody understands the strategy and is willing to help enable it.
Afterwards, Prof. Dr. Patrick Van Kenhove (member of VOSEKO’s board of advisors and the chairman of the Department of Marketing, see picture below) gave a critical reflection on the talk from an academic perspective and moderated the lively discussion between the speakers and the audience.
As VOSEKO wants to ‘link economic thinking’, a reception was mandatory. This gave the audience the opportunity to engage with the speakers. At the picture below, yours truly (@DauweVercamer) was in the middle of an active discussion with Bernard about the impact of the routing of the mail carriers on the structural cost. I want to thank VOSEKO for hosting another highly interesting lecture that integrated strategic, operational and marketing aspects and I look forward to the next one. I also want to thank Katrien Verhoeye, VOSEKO's photographer.
