Added Value to Customers

The comparative information supports decision making in multiple ways. If Acme performs below industry standards in areas important to customers, it could be falling below the competitive threshold. There is no alternative but to reach the industry standard. Table 11.4 is an overall assessment that could reinforce the responses elsewhere in the questionnaire. 

Of greater value is the ability to discover strategic supply chain opportunities. The questionnaire will not tell how but can point to the what, the output of the QFD matrix. These could be needs that no current supplier does a good job of satisfying. The strategic initiatives described in Chapter 10 are examples of responses to needs like these. In many cases, the strategic projects may also reinforce needs to improve in customer-critical performance measures. 

Lead time - having shortest lead-time 3 o V o o V I A  

FIGURE 11.1 Measuring Acme s activity system using QFD. 

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In reality, however, water treatment companies sell services, such as technology transfer, problem solving management, and applications specialization. These services, when used with chemical tools, provide a range of benefits, including operational efficiencies and added value to customers product. 

However, it cannot be denied that water treatment chemistry researchers have made significant progress in recent years. And some of the newer chemicals have most definitely added value to customers processes by enabling cooling systems to be operated under levels of stress and with extreme waterside conditions considered impossible to treat only a dozen years ago (the phosphate stabilizers and iron dispersant polymers are good examples of such useful developments). 

Internet-based account management services are now widely spread across the service sector (e.g., magazine or newspaper subscription services, residential telephone features selection, account statements in commercial banking, etc.). These offer added value to customers (e.g., convenient access, fewer errors, reduced paper clutter, etc.), and savings as well as additional sales opportunities to service providers. An interesting development in this area has... 

This is the waste coming from the production of more units than demanded. The optimum number of products to be produced must balance the demand, including that in high season periods, the cost of holding the stocks in the warehouse and the cost of setting up the production to produce one lot of the product. In terms of an analytical laboratory, overproduction could be interpreted as any activity that is not necessary for customer service or for adding value to the experience and knowledge of the laboratory. There is no need to analyse too many samples unless we have reasons to do so. Furthermore, there is no need to perform more analyses than necessary. Too many analytical results are a waste. For example, the optimum number of replicates must balance the need for statistical evaluation. 

Ecovio is used for applications for which its biodegradability offers an added value to the customer. The following two grades are offered today ... 

What is the value added Does the survey reveal opportunities for adding value to the customer s own products or for improving the performance to cost ratio ... 

Based on this understanding, a unique selling proposition that is not based just on products (i.e., chemical molecules) but on a whole concept of products, qualities, innovations, and services that offers added value to the customer and also allows Degussa to share in this value. 

Metrics for purity may simply be a statement of the purity or the impurity profile of the final product for any given process. However, if one is interested in purity from a perspective of greening syntheses, we might be more interested in how many times we isolate intermediates and or how many times we recrystallize the final substance to achieve the desired purity. Another point worthy of consideration is the idea that quality is defined as delivering the exact requirements needed in the eyes of the customer, and it is therefore possible for higher purity to go beyond the customer s needs. Additional purification steps will, in almost every case, add to the mass and energy intensity of a product without necessarily adding value to the customer. 

Value to customer needs met, wants met, customer importance level, added value feedback, additional information 4. Customer value convenience, experienced efficient consultation, payments, service, information and access, relationship strength, safeguards, personalization... 

The delivery of goods and services of expected standards on time at the best in class cost is creating value for money for customers and thus adding value to the business. An effective supply chain management team can deliver value by a value stream approach or total supply chain management approach. 

Customer service may be defined as the consistent provision of time and place utility, In other words, produots don t have value until they are in the hands of the oustomer at the time and plaoe required. There are clearly many facets of customer service, ranging from on-time delivery through to after-sales support. Essentially the role of customer service should be to enhance value-in-use , meaning that the product becomes worth more in the eyes of the customer because service has added value to the core product. In this way significant differentiation of the total offer (that is the core product plus the service package) can be achieved. 

At the centre is the core product, which is the basic product as it leaves the factory. The outer halo represents all the added value that customer service and logistics provide. Clearly it is not only customer service and logistics activity that add value in many cases advertising, branding and the packaging can all enhance the perceived value of the product to the customer. However, it is increasingly evident, as we have seen, that it takes more than branding to differentiate the product. 

The value added network is usually associated with markets where customer preferences are stable. Companies that complement each other in adding value to products or services, work as a part of a network to create significant customer value. The stable market allows companies to invest in long term innovations and creative product designs, as they can be confident that relatimiships with suppliers and intermediaries would not come under stress. While retaining the leadership roles for innovations, companies may outsource production and distribution to global suppliers and service providers on a transactional basis. 

The final strategy might involve synchronizing the demand and supply parts of the value chain. This ability to control both the demand and supply parts of the value chain can lead to significant cost savings and value-added capabilities to customers. 

Traditionally, customers employ water treatment service companies simply as external contractors to assist in the maintenance of clean and efficient waterside surfaces in their various heating, steam generating, cooling, and certain industrial process systems. The customers benefit from genuine improvements in operating efficiency, reductions in maintenance time, and replacement component costs. In addition, where industrial processes are involved they often profit from an added-value, due to an improved product quality or reduction in manufacturing cost. 

Sometimes, new values are added not only to the polymer itself, but also to the shape or physical state of the processed polymers to maximize the profit opportunity. For example, when a company develops a novel polymeric material and its manufacturing technology, the company may prefer to make their novel polymers available to customers in the form of intermediate consumer products, such as hi performance films or fibers, rather than manufacturing and selling bulk resins to industrial customers. To do so, the company should have a line of technical capabilities from polymer synthesis to consumer product manufacturing. 

It is enough to visit the clean, small production plant of Sol-Gel Technologies in Israel (Figure 8.3) to recognize that most of the value added to benzoyl peroxide entrapped in microcapsules comes from knowledge—and thus from human ingenuity—which originates the production of the microcapsules. The price at which the white water-based capsule formulation is sold to customers exceeds more than 1000 times the price of the raw materials used to prepare it. Put another way ... 

At the same time, however, development of a new apphcation or new formulation of preparations on the basis of the available inventory of substances are important examples of innovation with a high added value in the chemical industry. In this irrstance many SMEs are active in developing new recipes or in adapting existing ones to specific customer reqrrirements. This means that the abihty to be irmovative in the domain of chemicals cannot be illustrated solely by the number of newly registered substances. Or to say it in another way sim-plify ing notification of New Substances is not the sole and maybe not even the essential factor for the ability to be irmovative. 

The attractiveness of specific product categories, as discussed in the previous section, by and large defines the attractiveness of target markets as well. Besides its absolute size, the pharmaceuticals market comes first, because of its inherent elevated added value, the relatively high innovation rate, which leads to a steady demand for new products and for a manageable number of customers. The attributes for the agro fine chemicals market are similar, albeit less pronounced, specialty chemicals, in contrast, are needed by almost all industries and, therefore, virtually cannot be approached proactively. Also, the innovation rate in terms of new chemical entities is generally rather low, except in the electronic industry. 

Is there a niche for an extra product, or some cost savings to be made, or possibly a way of adding extra value to the customer s product ... 

The record of COC, the history behind the COC obtained, and the potential for improving the future operating COC is often a vital key to technically improving the water treatment management (adding value) and thus also improving the performance-to-cost ratio (which, in turn, may be promoted as a benefit to enhance the chances of obtaining the prospective customer s account). 

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