Introduction
In 1913 Henry Ford designed and implemented a new strategy to meet the needs of his customers by revolutionizing the automotive industry and manufacturing process. By September 1927, Ford had transformed all steps in the manufacturing process from refining raw materials to final assembly of the automobile which significantly reduced assembly time per vehicle, lowering costs, while increasing productivity (AAM, 2003).
Managing and innovating productivity while understanding the business core competencies is just one way operations management ensures a competitive and differentiation advantage. Since Henry Ford’s innovative processes, many business strategy models have been designed to give customers more value with their purchases of goods or services. The value chain is the latest proven strategy model which consists of a sequence of activities that create and build value while improving an organizations positioning against its competitors (Robbins & Coulter, 2012). Croc’s, Inc. an innovative retail brand footwear company started in 2003 incorporated a value chain strategy which had a dramatic effect on marketplace demands as well as helping lead to dramatic increase in revenues. The purpose of this paper is to analyze Croc’s value chain strategy and how using vertical integration to combine the assembly and distribution process under a single ownership (Khoi, 2007).
Value Chain Strategy
As a new business starting out the leadership at Croc’s understood that success in the footwear is based on customer requirements and driven by demand. The primary product Croc’s sells are shoes made of a closed-cell resin which is called Croslite and offers its wearer high comfort and a near cu...
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In the 1920’s the United States economy was booming, and a famous man by the man of Henry Ford came along and had an industry changing idea. He set up the first production line style for producing automobiles. Each assembly line worker had one or two specific tasks to complete on the cars that came through. The process began with a skeleton on the car, and as it went down the line from worker to worker it slowly gained more and more pieces finishing the automobile completely...
Famous for being one of the few people to greatly influence the twentieth century, Henry Ford was an innovator with a vision for the future. With his astounding work on transforming the automobile from just a simple invention into a great innovation that people to this day still buy and use, he shaped the twentieth century to a great extent. He was an American industrialist who founded the Ford Motor Company in the early nineteen hundreds. Ever since Ford was a young boy he has always seemed to have an interest in machines. He loved to tamper with machinery and other simple mechanisms. His first job was in a machine shop in Detroit which inspired him to experiment with machines and learn how they work. He learned to fix things like watches by trial-and-error and no matter what he did not give up when trying to learn how to fix things. He was one determined young man who worked hard and turned out to be a great leader with a very creative and imaginative mind. By teaching himself how to put a simple wrist watch together, he was able to use his newly found knowledge to move on to designing machines such as full sized steam engines. A few men who ran the steam engines helped to expand Ford’s knowledge of the engines by teaching him how they operated.
started up in 1903. Of course, it wasn’t all smooth sailing. George Baldwin Selden, an inventor, earned himself a patent for the automobile in 1895. This halted production of the Model A almost entirely. Ford eventually gained the support of other carmakers and eventually shut down the Selden Patent. Henry Ford faced many other challenges including greedy employees, failed model t prototypes and many more things. However, Ford also had his Triumphs in some of the things he's most famous for. First, Ford invented the assembly line. Before, one car would be assembled at a time bringing all the parts around to one place. Ford’s assembly line changed this. Now they could make and mass produce several cars at a time. Heres how it works: a bare chassis would roll down a conveyor. Along the way the engine, wheels, body, and a black paint job would be applied. Going along with the assembly line, Ford was also able to make a cheap, easy to fix,
Henry Ford originally intended the Model T to be the “farmer’s car.” But in order to make a car that was financially available to the common man, Ford needed an industrial revolution that would allow him to produce numerous automobiles at an inexpensive price. He succeeded in doing so by implementing his innovative assembly line and specialized labor for the production of the Ford Model T. By the 1920s, car manufacturing exploded due to Ford’s cheap and simplistic methods of production causing prices to drop significantly and allowing the Model T to fit within the average ...
The birth of the automobile was truly something special. Once a far fetched dream is now what many people believe to be the back bone of the American economy. When people think about the automobile the name that comes to mind is most usually Henry Ford. Although he is not credited with the invention of the automobile, Henry Ford played a crucial role in the development of mass production. The automobile was first invented Europe in 1771 with a top speed of 2.3 miles per hour. A man by the name of Gottliech Daimler produced what was known as the milestone car in 1889, this vehicle traveled at 10 miles per hour (Brown, 105). Not more then a handful of these cars were produced over seas. Not many people had ever seen one, let alone had one. It wasn’t until Henry Ford invented the assembly line, that anyone knew what a car was. Henry Ford and the invention of the assembly line altered the American economy and revolutionized travel everywhere.
The first automobile produced for the masses in the US was the three-horsepower, curved-dash Oldsmobile; 425 of them were sold in 1901 and 5,000 in 1904--this model is still prized by collectors. The firm prospered, and it was noted by others, and, from 1904 to 1908, 241 automobile-manufacturing firms went into business in the United States. One of these was the Ford Motor Company which was organized in June 1903, and sold its first car on the following July 23. The company produced 1,700 cars during its first ...
To get started, we first need to understand what Crocs' value chain is and how that process plays a role in the strategic direction of the company. The authors of our text, views the value chain as "the entire series of organizational work activities that add value at each step, from raw materials to finished product. In its entirety, the value chain can encompass supplier's suppliers to the customer's customers"(Robbins & Coulter, 2009, p.430). At Crocs, the entire series of organization work activities may be broken down even further using Porter's value chain model of viewing a manufacturing (or service) primary and secondary activities as a "system made up of subsystems, each with inputs, transformation processes and outputs"(Ifm.eng.cam.ac.uk, 2011). A diagram, compliments of Porter(1985) can be seen below:
The automobile changed American life, but the process was gradual. Though historians argue the date and inventor of the first automobile, we can say that Henry Ford’s creation of his Ford Motor Company in 1903 marked perhaps the major milestone of the early twentieth century automobile industry in America and around the world. Five years after the company’s inception, Ford’s legendary Model T of 1908 would revolutionize transportation and the world economy. Before the Model T, automobiles in the US were associated with only the wealthier class. Ford sought to make cars available to every American. His cars would assume the general build that continues to characterize automobiles today, and his innovation and system of production would make him a legend.[i] The automobile led to an extremely advanced system of roads and contributed to an American mentality of freedom to move.[ii] Early drivers saw both benefits and difficulties as the automobile became the standard American mode of transportation.
Henry T. Ford, pioneering automotive engineer, is mostly credited forinventing the automobile. The fact is he did not, he used what was developed and studied in the automobile industry to develop his own ideas and revolutionized the automotive industry. His creativity made possible for him to develop the assembly line that sparked the auto production.
Ford’s production plants rely on very high-tech computers and automated assembly. It takes a significant financial investment and time to reconfigure a production plant after a vehicle model is setup for assembly. Ford has made this mistake in the past and surprisingly hasn’t learned the valuable lesson as evidence from the hybrid revolution their missing out on today. Between 1927 and 1928, Ford set in motion their “1928 Plan” of establishing worldwide operations. Unfortunately, the strategic plan didn’t account for economic factors in Europe driving the demand for smaller vehicles. Henry Ford established plants in Europe for the larger North American model A. Their market share in 1929 was 5.7% in England and 7.2% in France (Dassbach, 1988). Economic changes can wreak havoc on a corporation’s bottom line and profitability as well as their brand.
Porter, M. E., 1999. The Five Forces that Shape Competitive Strategy. Harvard business review, p. 80.
Ford was able to make a reliable and inexpensive automobile primarily because of his introduction of the innovative moving assembly line into the process of industrial manufacturing. The assembly line is a system for carrying an item that is being manufactured past a series of stationary workers who each assemble a particular portion of the finished product.
According to Blythe (2012), marketing is a management process which identifies and fulfils customers’ needs and at the same time, makes profit. By having appropriate marketing concepts, Charles and Keith manages to develop within few years from an unnoticeable small shoe store to an international footwear brand which occupies a significant place in the industry.
Manufacturing methods advanced and transformed throughout the Industrial Revolution. Mass production is a system of manufacturing where machines quickly produce large quantities of product. Interchangeable parts are pieces of products that are made identically. These identical parts were easy to replace and allowed products to last longer. Henry Ford, who was the previous owner of Ford Motor Company, used interchangeable parts in the automobiles he produced to help keep the costs down. Ford also developed the assembly line. An assembly line uses workers and machines in a succession to create
By adopting the value chain into a manufacturing company, it will gain efficiency, effectiveness, reduce the product cost and improve continuously. For example, Toyota has implemented Toyota Product System (TPS) integrated information system with the business process which allowed the company to be more efficiency, effectiveness and reduce inventory cost. (Toyota