Personal selling is not one, but two processes -- making the sale and servicing the sale. The focus of this episode is how important quality customer service is and how it helps sales.
Rutherford Hill Winery is located in California's Napa Valley, one of the most prolific winegrowing regions in the world. Efficient production and operations at a winery like Rutherford Hill requires skillful management that includes: carefully anal...
For wineries like Domaine Chandon, making sparkling wine requires an enormous investment in everything from vineyards to corks. What makes the investment even riskier is that it takes several years for sparkling wine to mature. And the pursuit of pr...
Managerial practices exert a major influence on productivity. Managers who listen well and encourage employees to take ownership of their work and contribute their ideas often see employee productivity increase.
An accurate measure of productivity can be a useful tool in defining problems and deciding where to direct resources and energy. There are many ways to calculate productivity, but almost all begin with a simple formula: productivity is output per un...
At one time in industrial America, quality and productivity were considered almost mutually exclusive. Today that is not the case, thanks in part to very different attitudes about the role of workers. American managers today are much less likely to ...
The origins of the Total Quality Management philosophy can be traced back more than half a century to the work of W. Edwards Deming. In working with Japanese engineers and scientists to rebuild Japan's industrial capacity following World War Two, De...
General Dynamics' Convair Division produces weapons for the military. Under pressure to increase efficiency, the company instituted "just-in-time" production in 1990. In addition, Convair installed an automated warehouse system and began training wo...
In the 1980's, the issue of quality became so critical that an entire philosophy of management--known as total quality management, or "TQM,"--evolved. It was based on the notion that, ultimately, corporate success rests on quality. The impact of thi...
As long as other countries lacked industrial capacity, especially following World War II, U.S. companies could absorb tremendous inefficiency and still compete. All that changed when the Japanese developed new methods of integrating various aspects ...