The Power Of Information

Waiting for a delayed train, I can realize how powerful information is. I am staying among people, standing up and wondering when the train is going to come. Total absence ofinformation coming from the train company. People starting feeling nervous.
I have been in the station for two hours and I have seen over 50 trains coming in and going away. All thetrains on time. We are talking more of 98% of accuracy on-time pick-up’s (even just-in-time processes are worst than this). But, finally, 200 people are angry and unsatisfactory, notfor the delay, but for the lack of information.
So now I am thinking on our customers, how they expect our service. Perhaps they don’t need a KPI of 98% OTD, even don’t need a 90%one. But sure they request the information about the delivery. It’s no matter how it flows from the source to them, if it’s a track&trace, an EDI, a fax, a telephone-call, …whatever the media is.
Once I read in a logistics book that the information about the delivery is more important than the fact of the delivery on time. Today I realized how true itwas, how true it is and how true it will be.
How do we know that this delivery out of a million deliveries is special or not for our customer? Is any difference although we know it?Is there any reason for not using the most powerful weapon we have, I mean, information?
Just for ending this thought, finally the train arrived with a minimum delay of 20minutes. Would people had felt better if they had known this delay previously? Sure, they would.
We are in the era of the worldwide net and the globalisation. We can get in touch witheveryone no matter where we are. Don’t you have that feeling that is getting easier to communicate between continents than to tell the same to, even, our own colleagues next to us?