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Printable Handouts
Navigable Slide Index
- Introduction
- Operations strategy in action
- Order to delivery prior to 2007
- Sales, orders, inventory, availability
- Finished goods multi-lane distribution strategy
- Pricing model for lane strategy
- The mathematical problem
- Why ask CMU professors for help?
- Our solution approach
- Understanding the impact of complexity
- The cost of complexity function
- Modeling customer behavior
- The optimization model
- 420E product hierarchy
- SmartOps bundle analysis
- Results
- Savings in cost of complexity
- Discussion
This material is restricted to subscribers.
Topics Covered
- Product portfolio as strategic choice
- Inventories growing faster than sales
- Trade-off between market share and costs of complexity
- Burning platform for radical change in operations strategy
- Mathematical model for profit maximization
- Customer behavior
- Migration lists
- Drivers of complexity
- Bundling recommendation
- Itemized value creation
- Asymmetric strategy choice in duopolistic competition
Talk Citation
Tayur, S. (2017, December 31). Caterpillar bundles to win: operations strategy in action [Video file]. In The Business & Management Collection, Henry Stewart Talks. Retrieved August 31, 2024, from https://doi.org/10.69645/EYJC5914.Export Citation (RIS)
Publication History
Extended-form Case Study
Caterpillar bundles to win: operations strategy in action
Transcript
Please wait while the transcript is being prepared...
0:00
Hello everyone. This is Sridhar Tayur,
I am a Professor of Operations Management at Carnegie Mellon University.
Today's lecture is on how Caterpillar changed
its product portfolio and bundling strategy to be more effective in the marketplace.
What I would plan to cover today is first give you
some basic background on how firms are competing,
and then use Caterpillar as a specific example of the use of mathematical methods and
data-driven approach to figuring out
what is the best way to go to market with their wide variety of products.
0:39
So, what are the key decisions for a firm like Caterpillar that produces
physical products to be sold over a period of time in a competitive marketplace.
One is availability.
What availability means is if a customer walks into a store,
how likely is it that the particular product that the person wants is already there?
If it's not there, how long would it take that person to get it?
So, availability is a measure of the likelihood of getting the product
that a person wants about the time when they walk into the store or pretty soon after.
Of course, the customer is also interested in the price.
How costly is the product? And more importantly,
how costly is the access to their product?
If the product is a bit cheaper and they can wait for a couple of weeks, they may prefer it.
Or they may say,
"I want it right now,
I don't mind paying a little bit of a premium."
So, pricing has to do with the product itself but also if it's
really what I call the access or
the availability of the product that the customer is looking for.
Very rarely does the company produce just one product.
Apple is obviously very famous for producing a small set of products,
but Caterpillar like many other manufacturing companies
are known for producing an extremely wide variety of products.
In fact, the total number of different configurations that Caterpillar can
provide that could be useful to customers even within this product line,
which is building construction products is over 500,000.
Clearly, you're not going to make one of each and
keep it in every one of the stores around the world.
The question then becomes, what products are put in the store in what configurations and
in what quantities? And for those that are obviously
not at the store that a customer might want,
how do we get it to them?
Either because we have it in an upstream warehouse or because we can make it,
customize it to order in a short period of time.
Therefore, the problem of going to market boils down to four things.
One, what are the products that are available off the shelf?
What are those configurations?
Two, for those configurations that are not available immediately,
how do we get it to the customer fast
enough so that they don't take their business elsewhere?
What should be the price of providing this availability?
And if there are 500,000 different choices,
how do we bundle it in
some rational form to not only explain it to the customer what is possible,
but for us to be able at Caterpillar to
provide these products in a very effective manner.
So, what are the essential trade-offs?
The essential trade-off boils down to this.
I can keep a lot of inventory near the customer
and therefore get a relatively high market share,
but the cost of this inventory and the cost
of not selling this product for a lot of time maybe too expensive.
So, what companies like Caterpillar are looking for are really this,
how can I grab the market share in the most profitable way?
What I want to do therefore in the next several slides,
is do a deep dive on what Caterpillar Building Construction Products division did,
so BCP stands for Building Construction Products.
And after we go through the deep dive,
we will close with a discussion on,
what is the competitor doing?
One of the important competitors to Caterpillar is John Deere.
It turns out that I have also helped
John Deere figure out its product portfolio and go to market.
And let's see what are some things that Deere and
Caterpillar are doing similarly and what are some things that
Deere and Caterpillar are doing differently and why is it the case that
two companies, which are both very good, choose to compete in
the marketplace with different strategies.