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            ‘Global’ production centre  Distribution centre  North American  4 : STEP TWO – GENERATING NEW IDEAS
                                        Distribution centre       market
Supplier A
                                                                 European
Supplier B                                                        market

Supplier C                              Distribution centre

                                                              Asian
                                                             market

Figure 4.5 Initial supply chain for the HP DeskJet printer

The first stage for Hewlett-Packard was to identify other areas which
involved the underlying principle of efficient modular processes.
During the search, Hewlett-Packard came upon the restaurant analogy
identified by leading-edge research into business processes such as
supply chain management.109 The researchers had highlighted that the
basic food service transaction could be broken down into five core
processes: order the food, cook the food, serve the food, eat the food,
and pay for the food. They had also pointed out that the order in which
the processes could be executed was variable, subject to the constraints
imposed by the interdependencies – fast food requires ‘cook, order,
serve, pay and then eat’ whereas full-service restaurant follows ‘order,
cook, serve, eat and then pay’. You cannot eat before the meal is
prepared, but you can pay at any time, however.

challenging orthodoxy Having established that the food service
business offered a powerful analogy because it challenged a fixed order
of doing things, Hewlett-Packard started the second stage of exploring
the analogy in more depth. The core activities could easily be
transferred to manufacturing – ‘cook’ becomes ‘manufacture’, ‘eat’
becomes ‘consume’. It enlarged the ‘grammar’ and ‘lexicon’, as it termed
them, of the supply chain to include make-for-inventory as well as
make-to-order, gateaux as well as freshly grilled steak, as it were. It
acknowledged that inventory could include part-assembled materials,
the equivalent of parboiled vegetables, and it included inputs from
suppliers.

making the analogy work The final stage was for Hewlett-Packard to
apply the restaurant analogy to the particular supply chain problem in
hand. The outcome was significant. As shown in Figure 4.6, it modified
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