| Comparing to big enterprises, small and medium enterprises have got very specific trait. Their business style is very flexible and not bureaucratic. So they are able to meet diversified market demand. They are considered as fast growing enterprineurial forces. Though there are differences in classification in different part of the world, the important role of the small and medium enterprises plays in the major economy is all agreed. And the importance also attached to the healthy development of the small and medium enterprises, especially to the technology based firms. Many experts and researchers have done tremendous deep analysis in this area.Company A studied in this essay is a small technology based firm, who was established very early. While at the beginning of 20's, the business operations model started to change dramatically due to the adjustment of state macro-economic policy. Company A started to go into market independently to produce E-coating product for automotive industry. By introducing innovations, they developed high performance products, which provided high values to customer with strengthened technical service. They gained the recognition and survived in the market and started their fast development. But with the changing market environment and customer requirement and expectations, especially the boosting sales in automotive industry at the beginning of 21's all the international paint suppliers like DuPont, BASF started to increase market share and occupy the markets. Under the pressure of fierce competition, customers also prefer to buy products with better price/performance ratio. Like most of the small and medium enterprises, the development of Company A is in a dilemma due to constraints in the capability. This article focuses on how Company A explored its way of surviving and developing in the new market environment by applying customer delivered value principles and tools. The concept of customer delivered value created by Philip Kotler considers the values and cost experienced by customers from customer point of view. This principle truly reflects the"customer focus"mindset. Small firms like company A could develop so fast at the very beginning of their business mostly because they could meet specific customer needs; while their difficulties during later development was also because of not being able to recognize changing customer expectations or no overall consideration of customer expectations and needs. The eight influencing factors mentioned in the customer delivered value principle analyzed the customer needs and expectations across the board, which provided a clear guideline for customer satisfaction improvement.This article takes customer delivered value analysis as a tool, base on the two effective approaches in customer delivered value principle, developed a quantitative calculation method on relative customer delivered value. And provided some recommendations to Company A's development with some detail cases and scenarios. The study showed that there is enough room for Company A to develop in the current market with some energy spent in market re-positioning and conducting some survey to the specific market to clarify the key factor impacting customer delivered values. And then adjust the value stream activities within the company to optimize their strengths with innovations in their operation model and supply chain to ensure sustainable development.In one word, the customer delivered value principle is an effective tool for Company A to re-positioning market and identifying the customer needs and expectations. With quantitative calculation of relative customer delivered value, it helped company A to define key impacting factors so to improve the utilization of controllable resources. All these need a thorough market survey as a foundation to quantify the customer perspective with comparison in order to draw an accurate conclusion. |
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