Byte Products, Inc., is primarily involved in the production of electronic components that are used in personal computers. Byte products are found most frequently in computers used for sophisticated business and engineering applications. Sales of these products have been increasing over the last several years at a steady pace.
Over the past six years, increases in yearly revenues have consistently reached 12%. Byte Products, Inc., headquartered in the midwestern United States, is one of the largest suppliers of electronic components and is considered to be the industry leader, with some 32% market share. Unfortunately for Byte, numerous companies have entered the market; both domestic and foreign. The high demand from consumers and the high profit margins are the reason behind the competitive firms going into the market.
The company is now facing the demand of more products without the capability of producing, and the threat of new entrants into the market is becoming significant. Mr. James M. Elliot, the CEO and Chairman of the Board at Bytes Products, Inc, noticed that the company was facing numerous problems. The existing three plants run on 3 shifts schedule of 24hours a day and 7 days a week using up all possible production. It has now become evident to Mr. Elliot that if the three existing plans were to be running at maximum capacity at all times, the demand of production would still not be met. If the company’s overall supply is unable to meet the demands of its customers it would cause a negative impact on the company by not being able to maintain its current market share.
Mr. Elliott made the decision to build a new plant that would be able to produce at it’s customers high demands. Unfortunately, the time it would tak...
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...Develop new products
•Provide excellent customer service
•Gather customer feedback and focus on improving products.
•Further lower the price in low-end market segment. WT strategies
•Focus on high-end products.
•Reduce or retire products that has low profit margin.
•Focus on domestic market
This TOWS analysis is somewhat limited because all the information are based on the case in the textbook. However, we still could draw a few conclusions:
It is obvious that Byte will need some temporary manufacturing site to meet the market demand. The priority task for Byte Products is to get common agreement from stockholders and managers on a proposed plan. They will need to follow the plan and increase their capacity as early as possible. If possible, they should also consider spending more money on the construction of new site to reduce time and bring it online earlier.
Peak Garage Door Inc. has set a goal to increase their sales for 2004. Garage door industry is expecting a growth of 2.4% while the management of Peak is looking to increase company’s sales 26.4%. The company currently has 50 exclusive dealers and 300 non-exclusive dealers. Management has three proposals in front of them. The first suggestion is to increase the number dealers in their existing markets. The second recommendation is to develop an exclusive franchise agreement with existing non-exclusive dealers. The third recommendation is to decrease the number of dealers and focus company’s resources on increasing support for the existing dealers. Of course there is an option for them to leave everything as it is. My suggestion is to go with the second recommendation due to the fact that exclusive dealers produced 70% of company’s sales and non-exclusive dealers contributed only 30%. In order for Peak Garage Doors Inc. to reach their sales goal for ‘04 they will have to gain more exclusive dealers since they contribute much more profit to the company.
Andrews is a sensor manufacturer in the market. While the company has been unable to develop a straightforward competitive advantage over the course of the past three years, the competitive landscape of the market has become a significant source of concern for the company’s leadership. There are other companies out there who produce better products, or are able to compete strictly based on price cuts. It came to the CEO’s attention that there is an opportunity for Andrews to shift a large portion of its production to an offshore location. This decision will not only allow Andrews to reduce its labour and material costs, but will also allow for improved distribution practices.
Luckily, the damage was not as bad on the machine as initially thought, and after everyone at the plant worked overtime, the order was shipped very late into the evening. Working overtime is against current division policy, but was necessary to meet Bill's demand about shipping the product today. Afterwards, Alex knows he cannot dedicate the entire plant to just one order and begins to consider why the plant is underperforming when he has good people, good technology, and a good plant. Alex concludes the competition is killing him, specifically the Japanese competition, which is still beating them on price and delivery although Alex's plant has closed the gap in quality and product design. Alex has already cut costs by as much as he can but his prices are still above the competition. Also, Alex's plant has piles of inventory lying around and despite materials being released on schedule, nothing is completed and shipped out on time.
The major issues facing the company comprises of there being multiple businesses with different demands. There are separate levels of performance and success as well as growth chances for each of the sector and the firm needs to tackle with issues in each of these divisions (Dube, J.P., 2004).
In order for a company to push its improvement and create a balanced plant, it is necessary to increase the throughput, while reducing inventory an operating expense. But, what is most important is to identify the bottlenecks to be able to focus on them. After focusing and solving the constraints, everything else is going to be less powerful but important at the same time.
Arrow Electronics is a distributor of electronic parts, including semiconductors and passive components. It was founded in 1935 and has reached number one position among electronics distributors by 1992. Arrow’s North American operations were headquartered in Melville, N.Y. Sales and marketing functions were divided among five operating groups. This case study focuses on the largest of Arrow’s groups, Arrow/Schweber (A/S).
Finally, I have suggested some recommendations for the issues that I have mentioned above. In reference to the first issue, it will be profitable for the company to change to level monthly production.
Pacific Oil company was facing some economic changes over the next 10 years and the demand for its VCM was going o face some fierce competition. In the next 20 - 30 months other VCM manufactures will be producing the raw product to compete directly with Pacific Oil Company. The supply of the product over the next decade was expected to grow by over 1000 MM pounds each year, nearly doubling that as each year progressed. This poses a massive threat to Pacific oil as it negotiates its contracts only five years our and is now being pressured by Reliant to only extend their contract by three years. Reliant was...
Therefore, the organization should take a strategic growth-oriented and reverse type combine. On the one hand, the use of outsourcing and vendor competition to reduce costs in order to compensate for management and manufacturing inefficiencies, pay attention to controlling costs; On the other hand, combined with the advantages of their own technology, innovation, branding and marketing and other aspects of the product 's high school three grades are low pile of competitive products, consumer electronics growth to seize the opportunity to obtain efficient growth performance, and further expand market
Historically the personal computer (PC) industry has sold its products at reasonably high prices yet garnered only small profit margins. One reason for this is the high competition in the PC industry which led to competitive pricing among producers. Analyzing the competitive environment of the PC industry, it is evident that there is very little barrier to entry in this market. PC's have very low physical uniqueness and are made of standard components that require very little expertise to assemble.
Unfortunately for Byte the demand for these computer components have increased and Byte simply can not meet the demands. This dramatic increase in demand has allowed many new firms to enter into the industry and have cause an increased number of competing firms. Although Byte management and shareholders are pleased with the profits and growth of the market, it still faces a major issue of the increase in demand. Byte currently operates three manufacturing facilities that operate 24 hours a day, with three shifts, and 7 days a week. This constitutes the maximum production capacity that Byte can do and can not increase its output.
Electronic Applications was found in 1972, its headquarters are on San Francisco and it is a major producer of silicon chips. The company’s sales, profit and stock price have grown fast on the past years while the human resources policies have remained unchanged.
Samsung Electronics Company (SEC) began doing business in 1969 as a low-cost manufacturer of black and white televisions. In 1970, “Samsung acquired a semiconductor business” which would be a milestone that initiated the future for SEC. Entering the semiconductor industry would also be the beginning of the turnaround phase for SEC. In 1980, SEC showed the market its ability to mass produce. SEC became a major supplier of commodity products (televisions, microwave ovens and VCRs) in massive quantities to well known original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). For this reason, Samsung was able to easily transition into a major player in the electronic products and home appliances market (Quelch & Harrington, 2008).
Senior management of the bottle shop at which you work as a day manager wishes to develop a new stock control process. They feel that the old system is not coping and want to initiate a new, more streamlined system that will make operations more effective and efficient. This should be up and working within the next three months.
The search began as operations management at the company recognized the potential for improving production performance at one of their major plants in Hyderabad, called FTO3, based on rated capacities and actual outputs. They were looking for help in exploring ways to address performance more effectively. The production scheduling process, a complex and difficult exercise involving many products and machines in the factory, was carried out manually on Excel sheets with no real-time integrity of their business master and transaction data. Moreover, manual scheduling found it difficult to reap production scheduling efficiencies, while adhering to the rules particular to the pharmaceutical industry, which are mandated and monitored by agencies, such as the FDA (U.S. Food and Drug Administra...