Richard Schonberger, in his fourth and most important book yet,
introduces a powerful new concept: that the many links between and
within the four main business functions -- design, operations,
accounting, and marketing -- form a continuous "chain of customers"
that extends to those who buy the product or service. Everyone has
a customer -- the next department, office, shop, or person -- at
the hundreds of pioneering companies Schonberger has studied
throughout the world. Schonberger demonstrates the universality of
customer wants: Both the next and final customers want ever better
quality, quicker response, greater flexibility, and lower cost.
This condition provides a common strategy and calls for common
methods to be used across the organization. Every employee is a
data gatherer and analyst, unearthing more and better ways to
provide for these customers' wants -- before the competition does
so. As the new thinking and methods permeate every comer of the
firm, they topple departmental walls and adjust gang-like mind-sets
and "them-versus-us" attitudes. Performance is no longer measured
by internal costs but by improvement as seen by the next customer;
direct control of causes generally replaces after-the-fact control
of costs. Design is brought out of isolation. Finally, with the
rest of the firm reoriented toward customer service, marketing
escapes from a "negative" mode -- covering up for failures -- to a
positive one -- crowing about the firm's competence and ability to
improve. With the close attention to detail for which he has become
famous, Schonberger constructs a blueprint for unifying corporate
functions, brilliantly describing the new microcosms that will make
up the company of the 1990s -- focused teams of multi-skilled,
involved employees arranged according to the way the work flows or
the service is provided -- that compose the chain of customers.
Aetna, for example, is organizing customer-focused teams that cut
across underwriting and the administrative functions. At
Hewlett-Packard, teams of marketing, manufacturing, and R&D
people have already gone through several iterations of
"activity-based costing", which provides product designers with
previously unavailable data for shaving costs throughout product
life cycles. And at Du Pont, even production people on the factory
floor are involved in assessing competitors' product quality and
probable costs and methods. Through these and hundreds of other
real company examples, Schonberger shows how the customer-driven
chain of action leads directly to the kinds of bottom-line
performance that have been so elusive to executives who manage at a
distance "by the numbers" -- namely, higher profits, greater
security, and gains in market share at the expense of the laggard
competion.
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