Articles

Reengineering is a risky business, and the risks result both when companies try to do too little in their reengineering efforts and when they try to do enough. They may make the wrong or inadequate changes to systems or processes, or they may make radical changes that lead to political backlashes. To manage the risks of reengineering, according to the author, it is essential to anticipate a company's future environmental and operational uncertainties and to achieve consensus on the changes that need to be made. Scenario analysis provides a way to avoid the obstacles to "revisioning" -- overconfidence, intellectual arrogance, and anchoring in the present.

In their decision-making activities, managers need to tread a fine line between ill-conceived, arbitrary decisions ("extinction by instinct") and an unhealthy obsession with number, analyses, and reports ("paralysis by analysis"). The author examines the over- and underuse of formal analysis and describes its underlying motives. She identifies three types of situations that lead to excessive analysis and three that lead to insufficient analysis. She concludes that, since the causes are frequently structural, simply exhorting managers to be more or less analytical is unlikely to solve the problem. Attention must be given to deeper structural and cultural issues. Moreover, because the obvious solution to one problem may drive the organization to the opposite one, rational yet efficient decision making is a complex balancing act that requires frequent diagnosis and realignment.

Formerly adversarial relationships between retailers and their suppliers are giving way to cooperative partnerships in which both try to improve merchandise and information flow in the distribution channel system. By cooperating, retailers and suppliers can speed up the replenishment of inventories, improve customer service, reduce the need for markdowns, and cut the cost of bringing goods to the customer. The authors outline the key features of channel partnerships and discuss the reasons for their rapid formation during the 1990s. They describe the changes needed in traditional merchandising and distribution systems to gain the benefits of a partnership and the requirements for a successful channel partnership.

Gray market goods are brand name products sold through unauthorized channels. Gray markets have recently become more threatening to multinational companies as a result of the increasing number of global products available and easily accessible price information about them. The authors present a framework to select the right approach to the gray market threat by coordinating price-setting decisions based on the subsidiary's local resources and the complexity of the product's market. Through examples from their sample of companies that have dealt with gray markets, they show how price coordination methods have been implemented.

A follow-up survey to one published in the Summer 1991 issue of Sloan Management Review ("How Much Has Really Changed between U.S. Automakers and Their Suppliers?" by Susan Helper) shows that long-term, closely linked relationships have performance advantages for automakers and their suppliers in both the United States and Japan. Although such high-performance relationships with customers are still more prevalent in Japan than in the United States, the nature of supplier relations in the two countries is converging in some respects. The current survey includes more than 600 automotive suppliers in the United States and almost 500 suppliers in Japan.

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.