– Operations management and marketing have played important roles in contributing towards an ongoing corporate objective of delivering enhanced customer satisfaction. Focusing on the concept of producibility, this paper aims to explore the potential for developing an inter-disciplinary approach to market centric value delivery.
– For its approach, the paper uses a review of the literature and analyses a number of company examples to highlight the benefits of extending design for manufacture and assembly (DMFA) into the operational processes of physical distribution and service support management.
– A solution will be an increase in design for manufacturing or producibility engineering. Changes to achieve this will not only reflect the short-term “drivers” of performance, cost and time management but also “industry performance drivers” such as knowledge management, technology management, relationship management, and process management. In the development of an interdisciplinary approach, R&D and design would be a logical candidate for such an integration.
– The paper is based on specific examples, but there are general implications as business organisations have been able to increasing levels of sophistication in the processes used to understand the customer and to effect delivery.
– The new directions for operations management have practical implications for information communications technology (ICT) as well as the technical capabilities and capacities of production.
– By exploring some novel approaches from practice, the paper offers an original perspective from which to deliver enhanced customer satisfaction.
