Harman Luxury Update

A follow-up from Dave Tovissi

A couple of months ago a survey was sent out to help us determine how we rated against other suppliers with your businesses. I did that for a couple of reasons. First, I wanted to validate or correct some of the assumptions I was starting to form during my first 90 days at Harman. The second reason was for us to have a benchmark of where we actually rated so we could determine if the initiatives we set forth after the survey were improving our ratings with you. Before it was sent out, I was forewarned that surveys often do not have enough active participants to validate the results and that I should not expect many additional comments to the questions I was asking.

So I am pleased to report that many of our dealers did take the time to complete the survey and that most of them also took the time to provide us with additional comments to help clarify their ratings. If you haven’t yet provided us with your ratings, don’t worry. You can still complete the survey at surveymonkey.com/r/99DLR7K.

For those of you who took the time to rate us, I thank you for doing so and for helping us build a better company to serve you and your customers. We did in fact have a high percentage of dealers complete the survey, and most of you did share your comments regarding the reason you rated us the way you did. With those results we have been able to create process improvement plans and new initiatives to support your businesses.

The results of this survey have been shared with every stakeholder in our company. In summary, Harman received a “Better than most” rating in many of your completed surveys. However, we were told that several areas within our company needed to improve to become “Best in class” in all aspects of your business. We are focused on becoming “Best in class” and have taken your feedback to heart and have already made immediate changes to address your concerns. We prioritized which concerns we would address first and developed action plans and stakeholders to implement the improvement plans.

Here are the areas of the company we prioritized to address first:

• Provide better and more frequent communications with our dealers.
  That feedback prompted the creation of this newsletter and evaluations of our team’s activities.

• Provide a better way for our dealers to order and track their product shipments.
  That feedback allowed us to fast track our initiative to create a web-based dealer portal. This portal will be fully functional next month and we will pilot it first in the US before rolling it out across the rest of the globe. We will share more information next month regarding our portal initiatives.

• Provide a higher level of quality control.
  This area was actually being addressed before I arrived at Harman, but we added more individuals and processes to speed up the improvement plan. In this edition of the newsletter you will hear from Dale Seidlitz, our Global Quality Control Manager, explaining his role and the activities put in place to improve the process.

• Provide better customer support to our dealers and their customers.
  We are not only hiring more people to support your business, but we have been purchasing more spare parts and creating better processes to address service matters.

• Provide more frequent and better training.
  We are excited to announce that we have hired Training Allies to help create an e-learning platform and Chris Robinson has already been holding more WebEx trainings.

In future newsletters we will be updating you all on other initiatives that have been implemented based on your feedback from the survey. Stay tuned and stay connected with Harman through these monthly communications.