How to Capitalize on Changes in Customer Value Drivers
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By Doug Lawson
StrategyTo take advantage of this great opportunity we had to evolve from a custom engineering company into a systems company. Major changes throughout company would be required. In addition we would need to raise funds to finance the changes. We needed to develop a roadmap and a strategic plan to work from. We quickly hired experts from the customer base into senior influential positions and entered into a joint development project with a key customer. Next we began a series of offsite strategic meetings to establish good definition of the market and key elements of the products and services to be developed. The result was a clear definition of our market - semiconductor factory automation. This ended all discussions of diversification into other industries. We recognized the tremendous opportunity in semiconductor automation and decided it out weighed the risks of the cyclicality of the market. We would need to penetrate the Asian and European markets, which would involve significant changes to our sales and service operations. A key decision was to hire local executives familiar with the language and customs of each region. Our products would build off our mechanical engineering capability and would use our knowledge of customization to create increased flexibility. In addition we established that software would become a key element of our "augmented product". To round out our "whole product" we redefined our service and installation approach and added a project management function to deal with the large scale nature of each new factory. In addition to these external focused changes there were many internal changes to the company in manufacturing, finance, and human resources.
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