Stratoserve LLC

Michigan Auto Industry is changing

Somehow Michigan fascinates me for its auto industry and what it has given to the study of management,innovation and the wrong way to manage buyer seller relationships. When I heard on the radio about the leading rate of job losses and foreclosures in Michigan, I felt bad for the folks in Michigan. But this may be changing......

The news report that "suppliers learn collaboration and innovation" gave me hope. However, it is not the suppliers who need to learn collaboration but the auto industry who need to. In fact this blog has commented on the difference between US and Japanese auto and the long but vain scholarly research that has brought this out to an unresponsive auto sector.

But now, suppliers are no longer willing to cut prices to oblivion but are diversifying their customer portfolio and are not totally depending on the Auto industry but trying out opportunities in office furniture,food and appliance where a reverse auction type of mentality has started changing several years ago. Now the auto industry is changing, rationalizing the supply base and becoming more collaborative and driving innovation with its suppliers. I was particularly impressed with the take of Amerikam CEO Stephanie Leonardos on how long and painful this realization has been for Michigan Auto. But read the last few paragraphs of the interview here.

Mature Global design Strategies improve profits

I was rather happy to read the Aberdeen report's summary which highlights that global product design and development leads to reduction in product development time and time to market while allowing the protection of intellectual property through Digital Rights Management.

This blog and my research has been investigating these issues for some time and I am glad that the data is now available. The question is how do you make it work in practice, particularly if you are not a gigantic organization that can afford to open offices worldwide and actually place your person to work with the supplier in another country. That is an interesting question .....

Globalization - the perennial China India question

Globalization as we treat it in textbooks and the classroom seems pretty exciting and don't get me wrong- it is! But what amazes me is the wide mis-understanding among faculties, company executives and small business owners about what globalization offers as opportunity to the American enterprise. Let's face it , notwithstanding every criticism lately in the world America and American brands are considered "cool" in every country of the world. Certainly in China and India.

Companies look at outsourcing only as cost reduction, China as a cheap manufacturing base and are generally paranoid about Intellectual property. But just imagine, if you are able to deploy a thousand trained folks to design and prototype stuff in India and China for the cost of a team of 100 what happens to your innovation cycle? It zooms ! That probably is great in defending intellectual property than constant paranoia as this WSJ article suggests. 

In a similar vein the opportunities in the Europe , Middle East and Africa can be tapped with a base in India and China. Frankly till we all start looking at the overall opportunity in globalization we are missing the potential for growth and market dominance.

Consumer Data Privacy and British Channel 4 TV Sting Operation

At a recent talk at the North East Supply Chain Conference on Global Sourcing  (I will report with photos of this great conference at Marlborough MA soon), the audience had a great deal of interest in the privacy and IP protection regime and culture in India. I emphasized India's democracy and free media. Quite simply no other low cost country in both English speaking and so raucously democratic. You" see what you get" in India and you do have the option of going to the media who will willingly lap up your story - if your story  has any elements of interest.

But since all this probably wastes time for managers and the media needs to generate stories Indian media frequently has "sting" operations. However, I was a bit surprised that Britain's Channel 4 ran a "sting" operation where an individual offered to get customer data through call centers and then aired the "sting" on British TV. Two important points are of interest- first that the British Television Channel was allowed to operate a "sting" operation in India- many countries would not allow such "sting" operations. Secondly, the TV station did not choose to involve local police as media "sting" operations should (as in the US). Despite this the apex association NASSCOM chief has assured that the guilty will be booked- if the particular individual can be traced.

Going by the enormous number of "phishing" emails and very targeted junk snail mail and junk phone calls- I cannot believe that any data is really private whether or not call centers are overseas. In fact, Indian kids see call center jobs as a career and frequently have college degrees unlike the "McDonald" type status and hourly wage call center worker in the developed world.  Frankly, a real call center worker in India has just too much to loose compared to her/his western counterpart. It is not only a career and livelihood but major social disgrace in a very social and contextual culture. I would therefore tend to feel that data is probably more secure in India both because of the social context of the call center worker and the likelihood of real crooks getting hold of the data. Crooks would really have to fiddle around with data in Indian call center customer countries and because of good repatriation treaties between India and customer countries- we can expect some effective deterrence.  This customer privacy question , will however continue to alarm sourcers and would need good management and the implementation stage of different projects.