The Customer Centric Enterprise
More than two decades later, in 2003, this prophecy is still a vision not only in the clothing business but also in most other industries. What causes the renowned futurist miss the mark? Though we have most, if not all, the necessary hardware, software,
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The Customer Centric Enterprise An integrative overview on this book
Mitchell M. Tseng¹ and Frank Piller² ¹Department of Industrial Engineering & Engineering Management, Hong Kong University of Science & Technology 2²TUM Business School, Department of General and Industrial Management , Techni sche Universitaet Muenchen, Germany
The most creative thing a p erson will do 20 years from now is to be a very creative consumer ... Namely, you 'Il be sitting there doing things like designing a suit ofclothes for yourselfor making modifications to a standard design, so the comp uters can cut one for you by laser and sew it together for you by NC machine ... Robert H. Anderson, Head Information Systems, RAND Corporation, quoted in Alvin Toffler "Third Wave" [1], p. 274
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Open questions and increasing implementation
More than two decades later, in 2003, this prophecy is still a vision not only in the clothing business but also in most other industries . What causes the renowned futurist miss the mark? Though we have most, if not all, the necessary hardware, software, powerful computing and communication systems , including laser cutting, high performance sewing etc, we are still not really able to meet the special yearning of human beings, that very important feature that sets us apart from animals, i.e. creativity. We believe the missing gap is the capacity to put the systems , including organization, process and business models together and make them customer centric . Building a custome r centric enterprise that places the demands and wishes of each single customer in the center of value creation implies much more than investing in advanced technologies. Firms have to build not organizations and structures to produce customi zed services, but organizations and structure s for customers . With the customers at the center, human beings can then focus on being creative and be isolated from mundan e tasks in order to concentrate on expressing themselves more freely . Although few enterprises can be truly considered as customer centric today, successful companies have entered their particular market with initiatives and products that break with the paradigm of mass production . In order to be responsive to customers, companies have shortened the product development time dramatically . Taking the automotive industry as an example , the time to market M. M. Tseng et al. (eds.), The Customer Centric Enterprise © Springer-Verlag Berlin • Heidelberg 2003
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Tseng and Piller
has been reduced from six years to three months . One of the side effects of time competition in new product development is product proliferation. We witness thousands of new products vying for customers' attention in supermarkets. Even for commodity items such as milk, we have different flavors, fat contents, and types of feeds (organic or ordinary) as factors for differentiation. The main driving force behind the wide spread product proliferation is the expectation of many product managers that somehow one variety will fit with the buying decision of
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