At your service

The key word in business today is not quality or even price, but service.  And yet the first manufactured artefacts were entirely innocent of this concept.  They were usually produced by their future owner for themselves - a club or an arrow head - and service is always something provided for someone else.  It was with civilisation that objects first came to be made to command by specialised workers.  But even then the product was the service; no extra spice was needed to ease its consumption.

The Industrial Revolution began the move towards service.  Fundamental to this shift in manufacturing was the harnessing of mechanical forces: first steam power, and later electricity.  This meant that tasks could be carried out on a scale hitherto impossible, and the economies this brought meant big savings and lower prices.

Once begun, this drive towards cheap, mass production proved unstoppable.  Companies were forced either to join this mainstream trend or to specialise and become marginal.  Competition in the main arena of manufacturing became fierce.  As more and more companies reaped the benefits of mass production, so pricing became keener.  The key issue was how efficiently goods could be produced using the new techniques.  Technological advances meant that prices fell even as features were added; but because of the democratic nature of that technology - essentially available to everyone - the differentials in pricing soon became too small to be decisive in the marketplace. 

Over the space of a century and a half this led to an emphasis on quality for competitive advantage, and it remains today the dominant issue for production managers.  Given that prices of goods will be similar, concentrate on quality, is the theory.  The Japanese in particular made quality control the watchword in their factories, with well-recognised results.  But like price, quality is essentially driven by technology, and hence is readily transferable.  Now most companies are able in principle at least to match if not beat Japanese standards.

Hence the more recent move to service.  The cry now is that prices and quality may be the same, but the service - the extra, magical ingredient which comes with a product -  is not.  For a while that may be true.  But just as with price and quality, so service will in its turn be common to products, taken for granted, and varying little between competing goods.

So where next?  On the one hand there is the trend in the West to get out of manufacturing altogether as margins are squeezed ever thinner.  This has led to the rise of whole new sectors of business which produce nothing tangible, but work instead with information.  Significantly, these are called service industries, and are becoming increasingly important in the older economies.  But as far as manufacturing is concerned, perhaps the next move will be to completely customised products.  With the Just In Time and flexible production techniques of manufacturing now in place, it is possible to build almost to order.  Soon, you will probably be able to design and control directly from your home, via computer, the manufacture of any artefact, in any shape, colour or material.  Even an arrow head.

(26.4.92)

Index