Market Driven Enterprise: Product Development, Supply Chains and Manufacturing

Citation

Narasimhan, K. (2003), "Market Driven Enterprise: Product Development, Supply Chains and Manufacturing", The TQM Magazine, Vol. 15 No. 1, pp. 61-62. https://doi.org/10.1108/09544780310454466

Amiya K. Chakravarty (AKC) is the Professor of Operations and Technology Management at the A.B. Freeman School of Business at Tulane University, USA. He is a PhD graduate of the London School of Economics, and has consultancy experience in the UK, USA, and India. Recently, he has been studying at Lucent Technologies aspects involved in supply chain architecture and integrating suppliers into the design process to reduce misunderstanding and delays in product innovation.

Organizations to thrive, why even to survive, have to satisfy, nay delight, customers while containing or reducing the cost in the age of globalization, knowledge management and e‐commerce. AKC shows in this book how to aim for achieving these twin objectives simultaneously. As Professor Martin K. Starr says in his foreword to the book: “Dr Chakravarty sandwiches marketing (which is the driver) between organizational knowledge and information systems, on the one hand, and supply chain management on the other”.

The book comprises 12 chapters grouped into three parts. Three chapters form Part I (92 pages) that is entitled “Interfaces and Decisions in an Enterprise”. Part II comprises five chapters (201 pages) and deals with the issues involved in “Product design and time‐to market”, and Part III (206 pages), comprising four chapters, deals with “Supply Chains and Responsive Manufacturing”.

In examining how operational decisions are made in an organization, in Chapter 1, AKC explores the traditional functional (or domain view as he terms it) structure and the more recent horizontal process structures and the coordination mechanisms required to make them effective. In Chapter 2, attention is turned to an examination of the interfaces required between functions to create synergy among functions to improve information flow and for gaining competitive advantage through innovation, managing product variety, improve quality, reduce response time for problem solving and decision making, and reduce cost. A deeper consideration of information flows to link domains forms Chapter 3. The importance of information linkages in inventory and quality management, and the role of tacit and explicit knowledge in gaining knowledge management capabilities in e‐business are dealt with, in some depth.

In Chapter 4, AKC discusses the effect a product design has on market share and revenue. The discussion is based on product positioning based on utility and discrete choice models, conjoint analysis for multi‐attribute products, deterministic models for optimizing in situations involving small homogeneous market segments, and mass customization to gain competitive advantage.

The engineering approach to product design, involving function design and engineering evaluation, is discussed in Chapter 5. In Chapter 6, concurrent mapping of product features, dealt in Chapter 2, is examined in greater depth. In particular, mathematical models of house of quality or quality function deployment, and “pattern recognition model of mapping” are covered in detail. The importance of product variety and design benchmarks in different industry settings are discussed in Chapter 7. Mathematical models for designing a range of consumer‐driven and technology‐driven products are developed and the relation between strategies and capabilities are explored. In Chapter 8, issues involved in bringing a product to market quickly are discussed. Analytical models are used to illustrate the trade‐off among product performance, early freezing of design, and launch date uncertainty. New models for better understanding of design productivity, design reviews, and resource utilization are explored and overlapping of development tasks in different scenarios is discussed.

Part III gets into the business of emerging digital supply chains. The operational and managerial issues in evolving electronic business communities are the heart of successfully navigating the e‐shift. In Chapter 9, “The extended enterprise: a supply chain perspective”, AKC probes issues involved in the complex business‐to‐business (B2B) system, using both qualitative and quantitative modeling. In Chapter 10, these concepts are further extended to electronic chains of suppliers and customers with examples from industries, government, and researchers. The discussions in Chapter 11 are focused on how to configure a supply chain and how to maximize decentralized coordination.

Useful features of the book are the use of 173 figures, 56 tables, and real‐world examples to support the text; detailed table of contents, and subject and author indices, and the comprehensive reference lists at the end of each chapter. Though the book contains a number of mathematical models, managers and students who shy away from mathematics could still gain from reading the book by ignoring the mathematics. One drawback is the lack of a clear introduction and a summary at the end of each chapter. Only five chapters clearly indicate what is covered in those chapters.

Finally, to quote Professor Martin K. Starr:

Market Driven Enterprise is a remarkable compilation of materials that impinge on the competitive capabilities of rapid‐response organizations of the millennium. There are numerous anecdotes and facts about actual companies in real time.