LMS Impacts on Customer Requests?

As part of the procurement management work done at PLS, the Business Development team tracks various KPI’s including the value and volume of orders being placed by the network.  A trend that we have identified is the measurable drop in the number of weekly customer requests since the implementation of the LMS. 

It would appear that there is a cause & effect relationship here.  Now that many customers have access to over 1.9M items through the central catalogue, their reading needs are increasingly being met by items already available in the network.  The below tables show the use of customer requests over the last 4 complete financial years, with the first 5 months of this year.  It appears that from June this year there has been a considerable change in ordering.

From a network perspective, increased use of existing resources is always a better option than ordering new titles that are already available.  And from a PLS perspective, there are savings by not having to obtain catalog records for these items, and there is less staff time needed to track these individual orders.  Given the significant increase in the courier costs that the PLS budget is bearing, any slight savings are very welcome!

We will continue to track these and other measures over time & report anything that indicates changes in network operations.

Customer Requests cumulative by year

Customer Requests - Month to Month