Regulation versus self-thinking and personal responsibility, bureaucracy versus entrepreneurial freedom, mistrust versus trust, short-term, power-oriented thinking versus sustainability, to name just a few aspects that are on my mind. In my last blogs, I described my concerns about current developments that I see as a threat to our economy and our society.

Today I would like to take a look at a case at allsafe where we have fallen into the bureaucratic trap ourselves ...

Sustainability too complicated 

Our service for more sustainability all:change has been running for a while now. There is interest in our offer to repair and replace load securing products for the transport industry. We have more and more interested parties every month - and yet I have come to realize that The offer for more sustainability, which also has financial benefits for our customers on the bottom line, is only being accepted hesitantly. In my opinion, orders could be placed much more quickly. What's going on?

We are attractively priced. During sales talks about our idea for more sustainability in load securing, our customers are also on fire. But then this fire cools down quickly during the ordering process. The customer has to register on the all:change portal, enter weights and collection gates. They have to enter a lot of data, which is also required in order to issue a consignment note to the freight forwarder. He has to ... - we soon realized why our customers quickly lost enthusiasm for our sustainable solution during this process: The whole process was far too complicated. We had burdened our customers with far too much bureaucracy. We had, I have to tell you, lost sight of the customer benefit.

But that is not what we want. It does not correspond to our vision and mission.

all:change - Sustainability with one click

Sustainability and profitability go together, ecology and economy are two sides of the same coin. And so that what belongs together comes together, we at allsafe think that customer benefit is central. And what does our customer, who is on fire for all:change, want? In addition to an attractively priced service offering for more sustainability, he definitely wants one thing: no more bureaucracy than he already has. He wants us to make it easy for him to use the service. And with this mission in mind, we approached all:change once again.

The mission was: sustainability made easy. With this offer, sustainability should be as easy as shopping on Amazon. Order for collection of the defective parts, repair order and order confirmation, delivery and invoice - and all with just one click.

That was our goal and we achieved it. That is our way of customer orientation. Focusing on the customer's success, thinking from the customer's perspective, making it our mission to shape the customer's success.

With every shipment of an all:change box, we have an individual QR code with all customer-specific information, such as collection times, gate and collection weight. The customer takes their smartphone and photographs the code - and then they are simply asked: Should this box be collected? They confirm with yes or no in the window. And everything is done. We take care of the rest at allsafe. One click - and sustainability is that easy.

What we have done is something that I - and perhaps you too - would like to see from politicians: we have cut out the bureaucracy, we have streamlined ourselves, we have become faster because we have focused on the benefits for our customers - a good remedy against regulation, against self-centeredness. And a result of free entrepreneurial thinking, not just on my part, but on the part of all employees at allsafe, who have taken on the all-change bureaucracy monster in order to combine sustainability with economic success.

Detlef Lohmann