BUSINESS PROCESS IMPROVEMENT OF CUSTOMER SERVICE FOR AN EBAY JEWELRY COMPANY

Abstract

Increasingly buyers shun retail shops in favor of online sellers.  The focus firm in this research is a gemstone wholesale company which sells its jewelry on eBay.  It had an inefficient operation process that was causing the company’s late delivery rate to exceed 4.00%, which was the new standard eBay requirement.  The research objective of this project is to identify the root cause of this major problem, find solutions and implement improvement action.  The Business Process Improvement model (BPI) was chosen to improve the internal process to align with the dispatch time agreement with eBay.  Primary data was collected through interviews of relevant workers and secondary date from the investigation of company documents.  Process Mapping, Fishbone Diagram, and Pareto Analysis were used to analyze and improve the process.  The research identified two major causes of the late delivery rate, namely poor invoice management and insufficient shipment dates, so that the operation process lead time took over 7 days against the eBay requirement of only 2 days.  The research methodology then developed a to-be business process for improving the delivery rate.  This led to a significantly reduced rate, which although not achieving the eBay requirement would soon achieve this.