Articles

Although on the surface, toyota's development process seems extraordinarily cumbersome, it is a model of how to make better cars more quickly and cheaply. Toyota's engineers and managers delay decisions and give suppliers partial information, while exploring numerous prototypes. The authors examine what they call "set-based concurrent engineering," a method prevalent at Toyota but not at other Japanese and U.S. automakers. Toyota designers think about sets of design alternatives, rather than pursuing one alternative iteratively. They gradually narrow the sets until they come to a final solution. Through extensive research, case studies, and interviews, the authors present their argument - that this apparently inefficient system has made Toyota the fastest and most efficient developer of autos.

Although researchers have concentrated on various measures of customer satisfaction (CS) and the relationship of CS to firm performance, they have done little to determine what constitutes the best practices of firms focusing on CS as a corporate strategy. These authors report the results of their investigation into the best practices of four manufacturing firms with reputations for delivering high levels of customer satisfaction. They found that, although the firms developed a CS strategy for different reasons, each had similar characteristics that enabled them to concentrate on satisfying the customer. While the firms generally outperformed the average firm in their industry in profits and asset utilization after adopting a customer satisfaction strategy, they were not as successful in increasing market share; nor has the market valued them as highly as it has valued others in their industry. Finally, the authors suggest ways companies can improve their customer satisfaction measures and practices.

How will future traffic on the information superhighway affect each segment of an industry value chain? Will electronic markets provide new areas of opportunity for retailers, producers, and consumers as well? The authors suggest that the NII, or national infrastructure, will give consumers increased access to a vast selection of goods but will cause a restructuring and redistribution of profits among the stakeholders along the chain. There will also be an evolution from single-source sales channels to electronic markets. And electronic markets may lower coordination costs for producers and retailers, lower physical distribution costs, or eliminate retailers and wholesalers entirely, as consumers directly access manufacturers. Consumers' full access to the market will also be an issue that policymakers need to explore.

Companies are increasingly outsourcing information technology for a variety of reasons, such as concern for cost and quality, lagging IT performance, supplier pressure, and other financial factors. The outsourcing solution is acceptable to large and small firms alike because strategic alliances are now more common and the IT environment is changing rapidly. The authors offer their suggestions for determining when to outsource and how to structure and manage the resulting alliance. Most important, they suggest, is to view the outsourcing agreement as a strategic alliance and manage it as such.

Errors in data can cost a company millions of dollars, alienate customers, and make implementing new strategies difficult or impossible. The author describes a process AT&;T uses to recognize poor data and improve their quality. He proposes a three-step method for identifying data-quality problems, treating data as an asset, and applying quality systems to the processes that create data.

Japan's distribution systems, long the target of criticism, are changing. Deregulation, new manufacturing imperatives, consumer behavior, and the economy have interacted to reshape Japanese distribution. The trends have important implications for global business, since the system now offers areas of opportunity for Western manufacturers and retailers.

How can companies combat the overconfidence and tunnel vision common to so much decision making?

A new kind of information system is emerging that will reduce the time to market, help tailor products and services to customers' needs, and make processes more responsive to unexpected events. Expressive systems allow users to adapt quickly and easily to exceptions from standard operating procedure. The authors describe how expressive systems work and suggest ways of modifying the roles and structure of IS departments to implement the new technology.

How can you tell if your company is, indeed, a learning organization? What is a learning organization anyway? And how can you improve the learning systems in your company? The authors provide a framework for examining a company, based on its "learning orientations," a set of critical dimensions to organizational learning, and "facilitating factors," the processes that affect how easy or hard it is for learning to occur. They illustrate their model with examples from four firms they studied -- Motorola, Mutual Investment Corporation, Electricite de France, and Fiat -- and conclude that all organizations have systems that support learning.

An organization's ability to develop and change its information systems quickly and often is increasingly important. The two primary approaches to systems development have been build or buy. The authors' research suggests that a third alternative can enable organizations to both develop and change systems faster -- a "template" approach. Templates are existing systems, built with the aid of computer-aided software engineering (CASE) tools, that are changed at the design level and thereby customized for a new organization's use. The authors discuss the use of the template approach at three companies, as well as the rapidly growing template marketplace. All three organizations cited significant reductions in the time and cost of delivering their systems, as well as improvements in IS-business relationships and the ability to learn new business methods and technologies.