VELOCITY - DEE JACOB [150]
Injection: We create web-based mechanisms for buy-direct purchasing offering incentives and do-it-yourself inventory control.
Because of this …
We bring in smaller-volume customers at low cost to us.
But what could not be neglected was the matter of good ole innovation – finding new offerings in composite materials that could be patented by Hi-T, would offer razzle-dazzle in the marketplace, and might be difficult for competitors to knock off and create generic equivalents. Sarah Schwick championed this injection, and she tried to do so tactfully, because in fact it had been neglected. B. Don had been conservative in the innovation realm, content to grow slowly with existing and conventional offerings. The Tornado, in his fixation on the short-term pop, had killed most of what B. Don had going. And until now Amy herself had had too much to deal with to give serious thought and investment to pioneering tomorrow’s cutting edge, whatever it might be.
However, it was Sarah’s opinion that buried in the scads of archives at F&D there might already be a few candidates. These consisted of research and development conducted years ago – promising stuff, some of it – that had been shelved and forgotten about because Viktor, for all his lip service to Science, was more interested in current billings, or there was no client available interested in forward-going funding to finish development, that kind of thing.
“But,” said Sarah, “if we find even one worthy candidate that opens up a whole new market for us …”
“We’d be golden,” Amy said, finishing the sentence.
“And for a fraction of the cost of starting from scratch,” Sarah added.
“Let’s do it,” said Amy.
Injection: We seek “hidden assets” in the form of past proprietary research that can be used to bring impressive new market offerings in shorter time and smaller investments.
With this accomplished …
We know whether to fund advanced new research or develop promising new products for future sales.
Yet one of the most effective initiatives – in terms of a quick, positive, and lasting effect on the bottom line – came in the form of disincentives for certain types of products. That is, getting customers not to buy products that robbed Hi-T of throughput – while providing them with good-value alternatives that did contribute to much higher throughput, that is, of course, the rate at which orders became transformed into cash.
This came about due to those twenty-one and twenty-three-hour processing soaks in Godzilla. If there were just a few of them, they would be scheduled for a weekend, when the effect of Godzilla being tied up for an entire day with a single batch would have minimal impact on the total production system. But if there were a lot of these coming in the span of a few weeks or a few months, as Murphy pointed out, it just played hell with Godzilla’s output and therefore the throughput of the system.
“And the crying shame is,” said Murphy, “that our wonderful customer who specifies these long soaks is paying just pennies per pound more than composites requiring only a two-hour soak. Some cost engineer years ago figured out that the customer ought to pay more due to higher energy consumption over twenty-plus hours versus two hours. But that is almost completely beside the point! The real issue is that these long soaks are tying up Godzilla, and therefore the entire Oakton facility, and the throughput of the entire company! And what do we get out of it? A couple hundred bucks extra! That’s it!”
“And there is no need for it in a lot of cases,” said Sarah. “Years ago, there might have been value added from a practical or technical side of things. But with advances in resin chemistry, fiber, and so on, most of the time, with our knowledge anyway, we can accomplish in the autoclave whatever has to be done in a lot less time.”
“Honestly, the ones who insist on the long soaks should be paying,
like, ten times what everything