Final Customer Purchasing from an Intermediary of the Product

Maintain Steps: Maintain steps include all activities required to keep the product in working order. These steps include the costs the customer incurs to diagnose and correct product problems.

B.
Resources – Reduce resources required for the use of the product.

2.
Time – Reduce the time the customer must spend with the product

Reduce steps the customer must use with the product

No. SIC Year Note
1 3572 2002 EMC is created a program called AutoIS which will let corporate managers store and retrieve data no matter what machine it resides on. EMC Corp. teamed up with a group of service partners including Accenture and Electronic Data Systems to sell and install the systems.
2 4513 2004 FedEx controls 39% of the U.S.-China express market compared with 29% of DHL which is part of Deutsche Post. The fact that FedEx owns and operates its own fleet of cargo planes gives it a clear advantage on DHL which has to buy cargo space in the belly of passenger planes and is therefore vulnerable to capacity crunches. FedEx may have an advantage over DHL and UPS because those companies rely on state-owned Chinese parcel carrier Sinotrans for local pickups and delivery, while FedEx has an exclusive relationship with Beijing based Da Tian which began in 1999.
3 4700 2001 ReturnValet.com, a branch of Newgistics Inc., is a returns-management system designed for catalog and Internet retailers. Customers can return merchandise to one of several thousand return centers nationwide. They include neighborhood mail and parcel centers such as AMI Mail Centers, Hand with Care Packaging Store and Parcel Plus.
4 5122 2001 AmeriSource's success as a drug distributor has been attributed to good cost control and a focus on customer service. "We empower our managers to make decisions at the distribution center level."
5 6021 1989 The National Westminster Bank pays customers $50 if they receive slow responses to loan applications. Gives customers $5 if an employee treats them rudely.
6 6211 2004 At Ameritrade, investors answer six questions designed to measure their risk tolerance and then are funneled into one of 25 model ETF portfolios. The program also allows investors to check how their current asset mix compares with the recommended allocations. To get back on target, investors can just click a button and Ameritrade automatically sells or buys ETFs as needed to rebalance the portfolio.
7 7375 2000 AOL's version 6.0 allows e-mail listings to be sorted by date, sender, or subject. It's easier to sort mail into folders. The address book is much more powerful, and can now be printed out.

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