Sony
An awesome company designed around quality in operations, manufacturing, channels and distribution and professional services. Many people today would not appreciate the importance of quality and even fewer can say they were a great place to work, as a foreign headquartered innovation icon in the audio visual industry.In 1990, I joined the Corporate and Government sales team as the operations point of contact.
In reality, I walked into a mitigation action plan where the government accounts were at risk for not addressing the order processing cycle which was causing us to miss our scheduled shipments under GSA contracts. An early part of my career where technology was causing issues in the process for people. Technology was a mainframe system which simply was not easy to change and in my opinion we didn't need to change the system, we needed to modify the way we coded and broke down the scheduled shipments.
Limitations were preventing more than one shipment as the purchase order could only be entered 1 time. We had major shipments on a monthly or every other month release. You could not enter the total as Japan would build and ship based on the forecast. Each month I added the new scheduled shipment and everything ran pretty effectively. Which is why Japan asked me to manage the logistics and allocation of goods released through Japan.
I managed all direct sales for the business and professional group including serving as the person who determined which innovation or emerging and advanced technology offers were allocated across the America's theater.
Innovation isn't anything like a typical box sale. Mailing an invoice suggest the revenue recognition rule was met. When we sell a box, we must understand the rule changes if the hardware requires a software component. The rules become highly complex when selling solutions.
Patterns in Business Models Customer Size scenarios
10 - Fast Lane - Small and Medium supported by distribution and channels
The patterns suggest, known products and break fix service are directly associated and we can assume a fast track or fast lane where volume and speed rule and small business with channels and distribution are working to support the small and medium businesses.20 - Middle Lane - Service providers, Education, Financial and Infrastructure services
We opted for the separation of concerns with the customers as they customers needed to own the management and security within the comfort and based on their own risk appetites.Imagine if a Japan Headquartered company assumed the telecom provisioning part of video conferencing for each customer. If the company did that, any security failure would appear suspicious.
30 - Slow Lane - Globals, International and Corporate or Enterprise Accounts
New inventions go through a series of additional quality milestones for good reason, although their are the inpatient types who will argue these points as if the norms were no burden to go faster.The early trials for innovation offers are far more risk, unknowns are going to surface and knowable scenarios should be monitored.
System Integrators and Innovation
I also had an opportunity to select the three West Coast sole source suppliers or the resellers we planned to upgrade to System Integrators to represent the Sony Video Conference line.A system integrator owns the customer relationship and assumes the solution components working with the various specialty shops who supply the components.
