- UID
- 546151
- 在线时间
- 小时
- 注册时间
- 2010-7-14
- 最后登录
- 1970-1-1
- 主题
- 帖子
- 性别
- 保密
|
The Service Factory
The factory of the future is not a place where computers, robots, and flexible machines do the drudge work. That is the factory of the present, which, with money and brains, any manufacturing business can build. Of course, any competitor can build one too—which is why it is becoming harder and harder to compete on manufacturing excellence alone. Lower costs, higher quality, and greater product variety are like table stakes in poker—the price that companies pay to enter the game. Most products can be quickly and easily imitated; and the most automated design and production processes cannot decisively beat the second most automated. Who wins and who loses will be determined by how companies play, not simply by the product or process technologies that qualify them to compete.
The manufacturers that thrive into the next generation, then, will compete by bundling services with products, anticipating and responding to a truly comprehensive range of customer needs. Moreover, they will make the factory itself the hub of their efforts to get and hold customers—activities that now are located in separate, often distant, parts of the organization. Production workers and factory managers will be able to forge and sustain new relationships with customers because they will be in direct and continuing contact with them. Manufacturing, in short, will become the cortex of the business. Today’s flexible factories will become tomorrow’s service factories.
? ? ?
About 200 years ago, when horse-drawn carriages were made largely by craftsmen, the most successful carriage maker was invariably the most accommodating. Though he prided himself on being a technician—a manufacturer—his success depended heavily on his willingness and ability to talk with customers at key points: before the sale, so he could get a clear idea of what the client needed and what features would satisfy him; during the manufacturing process, so he could incorporate any necessary changes in the product; and after delivery, so he could learn what features had worked (and what hadn’t) and what the client needed for maintenance, repair, and replacement.
Mass production overtook customized craftsmanship because customers came to value standardized goods over higher priced, personalized goods. As a result, work grew increasingly compartmentalized through the division of labor. Craftsmanship (that is, manufacturing) became separated from downstream activities, like sales and postpurchase service, as well as from upstream activities, like new-product development and design. Gradually, manufacturing received more and more of its information and instructions through filters—divisions and departments that were separated, functionally and physically, from the production site. Not surprisingly, manufacturing managers complained that those who defined their work rarely understood it or cared enough about its details, problems, or technical possibilities.
For decades, companies muddled through. In recent years, as Japanese competition put pressure on manufacturing businesses everywhere, manufacturers have worked mightily and successfully to educate workers and break down some of the barriers between their upstream activities and the work of the factory. They have encouraged interfunctional communication between product designers and manufacturing engineers and between R&D and quality managers on the factory floor.
These imaginative efforts to accelerate product innovation and improve manufacturing performance were necessary and important. But they are no longer adequate. Today downstream activities have to be joined to the tasks of the factory too. Increasingly, factory personnel have the means to support the sales force, service technicians, and consumers. This support should, and will, be used. Competition is shifting away from how companies build their products to how well they serve customers before and after they build them.
? ? ?
Some of America’s best-run companies—Hewlett-Packard, Allen-Bradley, Caterpillar, Frito-Lay—already operate factories whose activities reflect the new role of service in manufacturing competition. None of their facilities is a complete service factory. We are still many years from that. But in the range of upstream and downstream activities these factories perform, and in the degree of interaction between production workers and customers, they point the way to the future.
Service for a manufacturing company inescapably revolves around its products—their design, features, durability, repairability, distribution, and ease of installation and use. Even the most traditional factories of yesterday proffered service of a kind, but their conception of service was narrow. To old-guard factory managers, service was little more than a commitment to meeting due dates. Logistics and distribution urged the factory to complete orders in a timely fashion, to give advance notice of delivery problems, and to package materials for ease of shipment and damage control. Customers were simply numbers on a production schedule. |
|
京公网安备11010202008513号 京ICP证101109号 京ICP备12012021号
发表于 2012-4-9 11:55:11
收藏
收藏
