Direct-to-Customer

There are more marketing approaches to the customer than ever before. Because the market is new, it is well set to embrace new routes such as the internet, farmers markets and buying co-operatives. The arrival of the internet has opened up an enormous opportunity for organic farmers to market their products directly to customers, and it has enabled consumers struggling to find organic meat to locate a suitable supplier and buy direct. Search engines such as Yahoo.com can allow potential customers who key in words such as organic and meat to access any number of e-commerce sites with which to do business. 

The reactor effluent usually contains a mixture of reactants and products. It is fed into a separation section where the products are separated by some means from the reactants. Because of their economic value, reactants are recycled back to upstream units toward the reactor. The products are transported directly to customers, are fed into storage tanks, or are sent to other units for further processing. The separation section uses one or more of the fundamental unit operations distillation, evaporation, filtration, crystallization, liquid-liquid extraction, adsorption, absorption, pressure-swing adsorption, etc. In this book we typically use distillation as the separation method because of its widespread use and our considerable experience with it. Everyone is a victim of his or her experience. Our backgrounds are in petroleum processing... 

An example of a business model innovation is when Dell began selling computers directly to customers, avoiding the retail link in the chain. With minimal inventories to manage, cash up-front from customers, and delayed payment terms to suppliers, Dell redefined working capital management. 

The company can sell products to distributors and/or directly to customers through business-to-customer e-commerce. In some cases, products may be designed by the customer himself or herself. This is related to mass customization. Customer needs are then captured directly through the customers preferences—the customers understand what they want and can submit their preferred design electronically. A well-known example is Dell Computers, where customers can select the elements that constitute a computer according to their own preferences. 

S. Biller, L.M.A. Chan, D. Simchi-Levi, and J. Swann. Dynamic pricing and the direct-to-customer model in the automotive industry. To appear in E Commerce Journal, Special Issue on Dynamic Pricing, 2002. 

Consider a supply chain cell composed of an enterprise j, M upstream suppliers and O downstream customers, products manufactured by supplier m m e M) are raw materials for the enterprise j. The raw materials are processed into finished products by enterprise j and are sold directly to customer o (o e O). For the logistics planning of enterprise j, suppliers M and customers O, without considering the internal processes of each node enterprise, assume that the supply chain logistics planning of each node... 

Further, in the well documented model of Dell Direct (see Basu and Wright, 2(X)5, pp. 334-337), where the traditional retail channels are bypassed through the manufacturer selling and deUvering direct to customer, it might be considered that wholesalers, distributors and retailers are redrmdant. These are good examples but are isolated approaches to suit particular circumstances and products. For example, some products are best processed in batches and stocked in bulk (e.g. food processing and cool stores). In the course of this book we aim to establish the appropriateness of each model in the context of a big picture approach. 

Laboratory Tests for Mineral Deficiencies. Tests for iron-deficiency anemia are widely used all over the world but most of the tests for other mineral deficiencies are limited mainly to research studies, because there is a lack of information regarding normal values for such groups as infants, children, adults, and pregnant or nursing mothers. Nevertheless, a growing number of commercial laboratories offer analyses of hair and/or urine directly to customers. These laboratories may also sell mineral and vitamin supplements to the people who use their services. 

Because these products are highly profitable but only sell at a relatively slow rate they are candidates for centralised management. In other words, they should be kept in some central location, as far back up the supply chain as possible in order to reduce the total inventory investment, and then shipped by express transport direct to customers. 

Equations 3.9 and 3.10 show the inbound and outbound shipment costs, respectively, that are included in the objective function, based on the transportation costs determined for each arc of the network. The outbound shipments are associated with the transportation of semi-finished and finished products directly to customers, regardless of the origin facility type, and the inbound shipments correspond to the inter-plant transactions among production and distribution facilities. 

Shipments from a converting facility to a DC or directly to customers... 

Equation 7.27 ensures that plant m can ship product / directly to customer c if product / is produced at plant m ... 

What are the reasons for a company, such as Nike, with a centralised distribution centre to ship some products directly to customers, not through the distribution centre ... 

Each cycle occurs at the interface between two successive stages of the supply chain. Not every supply chain will have all four cycles clearly separated. For example, a grocery supply chain in which a retailer stocks finished-goods inventories and places replenishment orders with a distributor is likely to have all four cycles separated. Dell, in contrast, bypasses the retailer and distributor when it sells servers directly to customers. 

DIRECT SALES TO CUSTOMERS The Internet allows manufacturers and other members of the supply chain that do not have direct contact with customers in traditional channels to get customer feedback and build a relationship with the customer. Social networking channels such as Facebook and Twitter allow firms to pitch products and promotions directly to customers. 

Tiffany maintained its own manufacturing facilities in Rhode Island and New York but also continued to source from third parties. In 2007, the company sourced almost 60 percent of its jewelry from internal manufacturing facilities. Tiffany had a retail service center in New Jersey that focused on receiving product from all over the world and replenishing its retail stores. The company had a separate customer fulfillment center for processing direct-to-customer orders. 

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