Case Studies

Transforming The Business Around The Customer BuyWay

Toshiba America, Inc. (TAI) is one of the nation's leading group of high technology companies, with a combined total of approximately 8,000 employees in the U.S. Toshiba manufactures and markets a widely diversified range of modern electronics, each conducting research and development, manufacturing, sales and service in its field of expertise.

Challenges

In the hyper-competitive American PC industry, six leading vendors control nearly 60 percent of the market. Despite the formidable competition, Toshiba decided to become a major player in the PC marketplace. Toshiba America's executives understood the industry's growing move toward differentiation strategies and direct-selling channels and resolved to compete head-on and make Toshiba a major player in the changing PC arena.

Approach

A series of business-model diagrams were designed to illustrate Toshiba's current and future business systems. This process gathered input from every key constituency across the enterprise: Marketing, Sales, Manufacturing, Finance, HR, etc.

Four themes emerged that became central to transforming the business:

The shift from product-focused to customer-first systems

The introduction of a hybrid-direct approach to order fulfillment

Organizational alignment with distinctly defined customer segments

A new view of partners as participants in an extended customer-centric, demand-driven enterprise

Results

Evolution of a corporate value proposition to increase focus on customer demand

Ability to capture, manage and integrate customer demand data into systems used to forecast, create, market and support product development

Improved customer retention and customer service through effective identification of and response to customer demand

Enhanced internal sales processes and improved forecasting capabilities by enabling sales representatives to share customer information

Enhanced financial controls through better management of revenue targets, increased process efficiencies and a reduction in costs

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