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To be used in conjunction with Ford Motor Co.: Dealer Sales and Service.

The new vice-president for Kentucky Fried Chicken in southeast Asia, must weigh the growth benefits of investing in China with alternative opportunities in the region. He is at the exploratory stage of market research and is focusing his attention on four possible locations in China. He must also balance his own personal ambitions with the possibilities for failure, not only in China, but the rest of southeast Asia.

The VP's efforts to determine whether and how to proceed with an emerging three-way partnership in China are described. Kentucky Fried Chicken has selected local partners and has been issued a license to operate a restaurant in Beijing. If he is to proceed, the VP must decide how fast he should advance the negotiations and which of three location sites in the city is most desirable.

This case presents the start-up of operations in Beijing and discusses the difficulties Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) is having with its local partners. By March 1988, KFC has established its largest restaurant in the world in Beijing with sales that are booming and showing no sign of slowing down. Nevertheless, the extent of operational problems and the shortage of hard currency profits is raising concerns over whether further expansion is warranted.

Since Henry Ford founded Ford Motor Co., Ford vehicles have been sold and serviced the same way. By the late 1980s Ford began to consider making changes in its sales and service process. Two developments forced Ford to reconsider these processes. First, Ford found through various surveys that customers had very clear complaints about the way they were treated by car dealers. Second, with more rapid technology transfer among the automakers, product differentiation was declining. Therefore, the channels of distribution provided one of the final potential points of differentiation between automakers. This case gives the students all of the conclusions from the studies Ford had done and asks them to redesign the sales and service process to address customers' complaints and become a point of differentiation for Ford.

The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award requires firms to submit applications that conform to a rigorous quality-assessment system. This case consists of several parts of a service company's 1988 Baldrige application together with material from the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award Examiner Application Scorebook. Students learn how the Baldrige Quality Assessment System is designed and how to score an actual application, yielding insights about how to organize and manage a company's quality-improvement efforts.

Discusses a large overnight express company, which guarantees its service, and which has created a major headache for one of its customers. The problem exposes deficiencies in its service and in the guarantee it has advertised heavily. A formal complaint is made to the CEO. From the CEO's perspective, students must confront a variety of issues related to the problem.

See (A) case.

See (A) case.

See (A) case.

See (A) case.

To gain an edge in service marketing, first one must build a strategy. That strategy must limit itself operationally and in scope or one ends up with service too diffused and ineffective. Customers can be classified in many ways; two obvious ways are the cost and convenience of serving a particular group. Good service meets or exceeds customers' expectations. A service provider can do a lot to position itself so that it can manage these expectations.

A customer satisfaction guarantee is meaningless if customers must jump through hoops whenever they complain. To satisfy them, it is necessary to make immediate amends--by giving employees both the obligation and the authority to honor a guarantee on their own and on the spot. In restaurants this may mean giving away drinks and food or picking up a check. Although this initially incurs high costs, each time something is given away a problem that can be fixed is identified. Finding and correcting the ultimate cause of each system failure leads to fewer complaints, higher sales, and lower costs.

The Fairfield Inn, an economy hotel venture by the Marriott Corp., has developed a novel method for selecting and measuring the performance of its hotel personnel that fits the company's strategy. Because it faces the need to grow rapidly, questions have arisen as to whether to offer franchises and in what form, considering the need to protect its unique concept.

Explores the issue of measuring and improving service quality and productivity by examining the radically different approaches of Northern Telecom and United Parcel Service.

Most fears about guaranteeing service are groundless. But offering a weak guarantee won't lead to success. The best guarantee is unconditional, meaningful, and easy to understand, invoke, and collect. Properly implemented, a strong guarantee boosts performance; sets clear-cut, customer-defined goals; creates a customer-oriented work force; and generates error data needed for improvement. A strong service guarantee can also boost marketing. It leads to more satisfied customers who generate higher sales and profits. McKinsey Award Winner.

Describes a major electric utility's highly successful effort to institute a comprehensive quality improvement program throughout the organization. Designed to be used in a comparative analysis of the quality improvement effort described in Paul Revere Insurance Co. (A). Students learn that there is no one "right way" to build the concept of defect-prevention into an organization (as espoused by such quality experts as Deming, Juran, and Crosby). Rather, the design and implementation of a quality improvement strategy need to be tailored to such variables as the nature of demand for an organization's service, its service-delivery process, corporate culture, organizational climate, financial performance, industry structure and trends, and competing demands for organizational attention. Important topics dealt with are program implementation, problem-solving methodology/philosophical roots, rewards and recognition, measuring results, maintaining momentum, and limitations/problems.

A professional firm cannot exist without its specialists - accountants, lawyers, consultants, bankers, and so on - who generate client services. But how can they be managed? One solution is the producing manager: a person responsible for both management activities and generation of client services. With producing managers heading small, autonomous business units, the organization can stay nonbureaucratic and non-hierarchical and still grow, change, and retain its competitive edge.

Caruso's Pizza is a small, entrepreneurial restaurant chain. The case considers expansion of an experimental pizza delivery system ("express delivery") that involves a major process innovation--producing pizzas to inventory rather than to order. The system promises faster delivery of higher quality pizza, but as yet is an unproven technology. By the end of the case, students will realize that delivery-only units and high order volume are required to make express delivery viable. One way of achieving this high order volume may be a one-phone-number system--a new computerized technology.

Describes a program of value-analysis workshops undertaken by this company as part of its massive effort to regain the number one position in its industry. The value-analysis workshops are the second half of the company's two-part Quality Has Value process. The focus is on: 1) the general question of how to apply value analysis, an industrial-engineering based tool, to white-collar work, and 2) how to handle some very sensitive issues that came out of the value-analysis workshop for a particular department.