Shipper Company Case Study

Shipper Company started in 1960s in the business of aerospace. At the beginning, the company only produced the Echo weather satellites. However, recently the Shipper Company had diversified into three divisions: the Electronical Products Division, the Materials Division and the Advanced Products Division.

The Electronical Products Division, which produced circuit boards and other electronics products, has a strategy that focus on the mass market. The Materials Division ‘s main products is laminated plastic materials, which are sold to EPD, APD and outside customers. The Advance products Division produced aerostat which are sold to communications companies, the US government and other countries. Morevoer, APD also produces many other products such as mine stoppers and blade liners.

In APD, the products are made to the order of customers. APD responds to the individual customer design requirements and the products are designed to unique customer applications. With this characteristic, the most suitable strategies for production are job shop or project as the producst are very customized, unique and heavily depend on the customer’s applications.

As the sales and profits of APD have been unstable recently, APD managers decide to formulate a new business strategy that is more market-focused: to bring on stream new products with higher-volume to multiple customers and change the process to continuous production, which means the company product-process strategy moving down in the product-process matrix. However, APD managers also emphasize that this change is gradual and their purpose is not to eliminate the APD dependence al specified products for short-run customers, but only reduce it.

In order to make this strategy successful, the APD has to make a cross functional decision including marketing, manufacture and techonology. First, as the strategy is market-focused, it would require enlargement of market research, market development, and sales distribution system.

Secondly, manufacturing plays a very important role in this strategy because changing from low-volume, customized production to a higher-volume and standardized product lines would require a great change in facilities, people and production control system. APD has already deployed the