Managing Innovation Cases from the Services Industries (1988) / Chapter Skim
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Pictures and Parts: Delivering an Automated Automotive Parts Catalog
Pictures and Parts: Delivering an Automated Automotive Parts Catalog
Pages 36-56
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From page 36... ...
Organizations responsible for high-volume communications with hundreds of dealerships, branches, and field-support facilities often rely on micropublishing to reduce communications to a manageable size and to controllable costs. By dramatically reducing printing and mailing costs, micropublishing enables large documents to be economically distributed frequently, providing dealers and service operations with more current information.
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From page 37... ...
In this form, microfiche versions of the catalog could be produced directly, but the relationships between data elements necessary for an "electronic parts catalog" did not exist. As data processing techniques for relational data base management spread to publishing in the mid and late 1970s, a parts catalog data base became an important way of lessening the time and labor content required to update a set of catalogs, as well as a way of improving accuracy and consistency.
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From page 38... ...
Silver halide-based film duplicating is capital intensive, whereas diazo and vesicular film duplicating are not. In the 1970s PSD was regarded as the "Cadillac" of micropublishing service bureaus in terms of product quality, service, and indexing.
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From page 39... ...
John Marken recalls, "the silver crisis drove us and our customers to diazo film." Dave Gump, who was then general manager, remembers, "The profit margin on silver was higher, and we had few competitors in silver microfiche. The profit margins went down significantly with the switch to diazo film." Don Prince, who is now vice president of operations, was production manager at the time, and notes that with the switch from silver to diazo:
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From page 40... ...
Dave Gump's comments on the DDSI acquisition: Automated technical publishing (ATP) was a very complex business.
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From page 41... ...
John Ramagli, then vice president of sales, recalls: In April of 1983, the first GM parts catalog microfiche publication went out to the field. We had reasonable support from the GM dealers.
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From page 42... ...
John Marken remembers Donald Frey, the chairman of Bell & Howell, suggesting that PSD should pursue an all electronic solution because dealers would not accept a mixed microform/PC system. Dave Gump recalls that it was also at this conference that he first learned about low-cost compact disk read-only memory (CD-ROM)
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From page 43... ...
Just over a third of parts catalog lockups involve the illustrations. Dave Gump notes: Reducing the parts department's labor cost for catalog lockups was what we expected would provide the cost justification for an electronic catalog.
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From page 44... ...
GM offers a program of credits to encourage dealers to reduce returns. Nearly half of all GM dealers have computerized inventory control systems, and most of the larger dealers have computerized inventory control, usually as part of a "dealer services" system sold by a data processing equipment value-added reseller.
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From page 45... ...
Dave Gump explains his strategy for acquiring technology: We didn't want to replicate what was already there. We wanted to use as many offthe-shelf components as were available.
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From page 46... ...
Also, because of PSD's expertise in designing microfiche retrieval systems for service applications, the project team was aware that service and repair documentation contained photographs with very small print describing repair procedures (see Figures 3 and 41. Sources of Information In search of a technical solution for the "beta" project, Dave Gump and Don Gardner began to investigate and evaluate the options available.
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From page 47... ...
Dave Gump explains his thoughts on the importance of the Bell & Howell Technology Conferences: Not only did these conferences foster the sharing of technical research among the Bell & Howell divisions, they also provided annual reinforcement and corporate support for technological change. The conferences afforded us the opportunity to present new product concepts which could easily have been stifled.
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From page 48... ...
Dave Gump explains: We saw a demonstration that visually confirmed that gray scale solved our image quality problem at an affordable cost. Our contact at a Boston consulting firm explained that there was scientific support for gray scale and referred us to research being done at MIT.
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From page 49... ...
The chairman agreed in principle, and remembers that throughout August, PSD management proceeded to push the proposal up through channels for funding approval "with acceptance at best neutral from outside the division." On September 6, 1984, an outside consultant was contracted to develop the prototype. During the same time, the project team increased to five people.
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From page 50... ...
In addition to development activities on the GM parts catalog application, during 1985 research projects on GM dealers' service and repair procedures and Chrysler dealers' parts operations were started. Field Tests In January 1986 the IDB2000 prototype system was demonstrated at the National Automotive Dealers Association (NADA)
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From page 51... ...
In June after much consideration, the PSD development team determined that IDB2000 design changes would be necessary. Dave Gump explains: The number of users that we had to support and the performance requirements indicated that it would require a very large computer.
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From page 52... ...
Lack of cooperation from the two major inventory control system vendors was likely to turn into opposition and competition at product launch. Product Launch Early in 1987, PSD's Marketing and Sales Management was completing the plans for the IDB2000 product introduction and adding the marketing and sales staff required to successfully launch and actively sell the system to GM dealers.
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From page 53... ...
was field testing an Acura EPC with Honda dealers. The two largest data processing equipment vendors were advising dealers not to buy the IDB, but sales continued to be strong-surpassing one large system sold per day within 3 months of launch.
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From page 54... ...
The second largest DCS vendor announced a competitive product and acquired access to the GM parts catalog data. PSD developed simple interfaces to the more popular DCS packages.
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From page 55... ...
At the end of October 1987, PSD's fiscal years revenues were forecast to achieve 100 percent of budget and 1988 IDB revenues were budgeted at approximately twice those of 1987. CONCLUSIONS This case chronicles the efforts of Bell & Howell PSD to meet its customers' desire for an "automated parts catalog lookup system." It describes the transformation of a micropublishing service bureau through the search for a technical solution to meet its customers' unique information retrieval requirements.
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From page 56... ...
The task of evolving from microfilm to electronics technologies was recognized as difficult and risky, but the alternative was a shrinking business. With a knowledge of the user's requirements for information retrieval, the PSD project team was able to identify the technical issues essential to providing dealers with a fully electronic solution.
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