Final Customer Purchasing from the Product Producer
Use Steps: Use steps include all the customer's value added activities or the consumption of the product itself. These steps include all the costs the customer incurs in employing the product in its intended use.
B.
Resources: Reduce resources required for the use of the product
2.
Time: Reduce the time the customer must spend with the product
B. Improve wait times in the process
Reduce wait times in the process
Speed the process
Other
No. | SIC | Year | Note |
1 | 3571 | 2004 | Orion Multisystems has decided to target engineers and scientists in the biological and chemical industries who already use clustered systems necessary for jobs requiring a great deal of processor power. By giving each worker in a group the equivalent of a small supercomputer cluster, Orion hopes to cut the waiting and sharply boost productivity. |
2 | 3572 | 2003 | A new line of storage products from EMC is expected to put the fear back in its competitors-IBM, Hitachi and Hewlett-Packard. The company will unveil the sixth wave of the Symmetrix product line, called Symmetrix 6, which includes five new storage devices. The speed of the systems is expected to far exceed that of current fare. EMC's new Symmetrix 6 data-storage systems are said to have an internal speed of 64 gigabytes vs. 1.6 gigabytes on its current system. Hitachi's top-end system runs at 10.6 gigabytes. |
3 | 3674 | 2005 | For Texas Instruments, shifting to China would be expensive. Although salaries in China are cheaper, the workforce in Baguio is more highly educated. TI pays overtime wages for customs officials to ensure that shipments can be quickly flown out late at night or on weekends from former US military bases. "We've organized our logistics in such a way that we can cut a lot of red tape." As a result, TI is able to turn around shipments faster than several of the company's other facilities in Asia. |
4 | 3695 | 2001 | UltimateTV's interface and usability are also superior as menus and on-screen guides are easier to use. The UltimateTV remote is better too, as it has a commercial skip button that leaps ahead in 30-second intervals. |
5 | 4512 | 2003 | Valley Air is forming an alliance with small regional carriers in Arizona and Washington state and repositioning itself to take over routes that were ended by larger and medium-size airlines. When it first offered a half-hour flight from Santa Rosa to Oakland, the price was $75 for a reserved ticket. That was in comparison to an Airport Express bus for $20. Valley Air modeled itself after no-frills Southwest and JetBlue, the world's most profitable carriers. |
6 | 4813 | 2001 | Will demand for new wireless services come from consumers or business users? The answer determines where companies like Sprint PCS will put their resources. Speedier networks should open up many uses for mobile phones beyond just voice calls. One such use is mobile commerce. |
7 | 4813 | 2003 | Unlike many wireless carriers, Nextel is profitable, with the highest revenue per customer in the business, and it is likely to keep its push-to-talk edge for a while. Motorola phones take 10 to 15 seconds to establish a connection, which Nextel phones do almost instantaneously. There is also a delay of five seconds before hearing what the other person said. Verizon is selling push-to-talk primarily as a service for all business types. For the time being, it is matching Nextel with a $60-a-month plan, including unlimited push-to-talk |
8 | 4899 | 2003 | Instead of lowering most of their monthly fees, Comcast and Time Warner have boosted broadband speeds by 50% to 3 megabits per second. That's twice as fast as top DSL speeds. |
9 | 5812 | 2004 | Since 2000, Starbucks has been slowly installing special espresso machines in all of its 9,000 world-wide restaurants. With the push of a button, these machines grind coffee beans for espresso and then brew the beverage, allowing baristas to focus on steaming milk for latte drinks that are heavily in demand. The machines produce a more consistent amount and flavor of espresso, and have cut 24 seconds off the average time it takes to "pull an espresso shot." The sharper focus on speed doesn't seem to have hurt the chain's order-accuracy rate, which has remained consistent at about 99.4%. |
10 | 7011 | 2005 | Hilton's luxury chain of Conrad hotels must introduce travelers to a relatively unknown brand. They have budgeted $60 million for advertising and offer butler services, spas and plush linens, guests will bypass the front counter and go directly to their rooms. Prices will be slightly lower than competitor Four Seasons. |
11 | 7372 | 2004 | Tabbed browsing is the latest innovation in Web browsing. There are numerous choices among tabbed browsers, including Netscape, Opera and Mozilla. For Macs there is Safari, free when purchasing a Mac. These are all better products than Microsoft's popular Internet Explorer since they enable the user to search faster. |
12 | 7372 | 2003 | The new AutoCAD has noticeable improvements in speed and performance. Much of that has to do with the fact the file sizes it creates are much smaller now. The company estimates that drawing files are one-third to two-thirds the size of file created in the current version of AutoCAD. |
13 | 7372 | 2003 | Users can spend 40 hours a week with Autodesk software, so improvements are highly desired. AutoCAD 2004 speeds up simple things like opening and closing file and creates shortcuts for many common tasks. Saving a file is 66% faster and opening a file is 33% faster. |
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