About the Book
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.
Table of Contents:
Contents Preface 1. The Great Awakening: Earthquakes in the Business Functions 2. Universal Strategy: The Shattering of Strategic Business Thought 3. The "Customer-In" Organization 4. Total Quality: Toward Delighting the Customer 5. Work Force on the Attack 6. The Learning Organization 7. Attack on Nonobvious Wastes 8. Minimal Accounting and Noncost Cost Control 9. Pay, Recognition, Celebration 10. World-Class Product Development 11. Marketing for Total Gain 12. Success Formulas for Volume and Flexibility 13. Elevated Performance Standards Appendix: Quick (JIT) Response Notes Index
About the Author :
Richard J. Schonberger, author of the bestselling Japanese Manufacturing Techniques, World Class Manufacturing, and World Class Manufacturing Casebook (also from The Free Press), is a world-renowned authority on production and manufacturing. President of the consulting firm Schonberger & Associates, Inc., in Seattle, Washington, he was formerly George Cook Professor of Management at the University of Nebraska.
Review :
Charles Bingham Executive Vice President, Weyerhaeuser Company I highly recommend "Building a Chain of Customers" as required reading for every CEO who is truly committed to leading his or her organization to world-class manufacturing excellence.
H. Thomas Johnson Retzlaff Professor of Cost Management Portland State University Co-author of "Relevance Lost" Schonberger presents a powerful synthesis of leading-edge thinking that is bound to shape management practice well into the next century. This is the one book all managers, regardless of background or experience, "must" read in 1990. Schonberger uses scores of examples to show how the concept of "building a chain of customers" unifies all functions in the world-class enterprise.
Herbert B. Morote, Ph.D. Sector President-Medical Becton Dickinson and Company This book needs to be read and thoroughly understood by America's top management. It not only gives the answers to the Why's but gives precise direction to the How's. I totally agree that high quality, lower cost, quicker response and greater flexibility are not in conflict but mutually supportive.
Raymond G. Adams Director, Manufacturing Operations Engine Division Caterpillar, Inc. Richard Schonberger has provided a great deal of substance for a concept that we fully endorse. Executing the concept that every employee, regardless of his/her physical location and position in the business, has a customer that must be satisfied with quality and timely service or product is easy to articulate but challenging to implement thoroughly in a large organization.
Tom Peters Author of "Thriving on Chaos" Organizations must be radically reconfigured. Richard Schonberger provides a bold -- and meticulously detailed -- blueprint for redesigning corporations to destroy functional myopia, to live as a whole to serve the customer.
Charles BinghamExecutive Vice President, Weyerhaeuser Company
H. Thomas JohnsonRetzlaff Professor of Cost Management Portland State University Co-author of "Relevance Lost"
Schonberger presents a powerful synthesis of leading-edge thinking that is bound to shape management practice well into the next century. This is the one book all managers, regardless of background or experience, "must" read in 1990. Schonberger uses scores of examples to show how the concept of "building a chain of customers" unifies all functions in the world-class enterprise.
Herbert B. Morote, Ph.D.Sector President-Medical Becton Dickinson and Company
This book needs to be read and thoroughly understood by America's top management. It not only gives the answers to the Why's but gives precise direction to the How's. I totally agree that high quality, lower cost, quicker response and greater flexibility are not in conflict but mutually supportive.
Raymond G. AdamsDirector, Manufacturing Operations Engine Division Caterpillar, Inc.
Richard Schonberger has provided a great deal of substance for a concept that we fully endorse. Executing the concept that every employee, regardless of his/her physical location and position in the business, has a customer that must be satisfied with quality and timely service or product is easy to articulate but challenging to implement thoroughly in a large organization.
Tom PetersAuthor of "Thriving on Chaos"
Organizations must be radically reconfigured. Richard Schonberger provides a bold -- and meticulously detailed -- blueprint for redesigning corporations to destroy functional myopia, to live as a whole to serve the customer.
