Xerox is one of the largest companies in the document processing products and services industry. Xerox held a virtual monopoly in the plain-paper copier market until the Federal Trade Commission intervened. In 1975 Xerox was forced to forfeit patent protection and had to license to competitors. Xerox’s markets share dipped from 80% in 1976 to 13% in 1982. In order to become more competitive, Xerox began to use benchmarking, Leadership through Quality and employee involvement initiatives. These initiatives helped grow Xerox’s market share back to 18% in the low end copier business and 35% in the mid-to-high end. Despite the improvements in market share the financial performance of the company declined. Therefore in 1992 a major reorganization was planned, Xerox would change from a geographic organization to a market segment organization.
Xerox corporate information management (CIM) unit was established in the early 1970s. In 1987, CIM was moved to the General Services Division and was given the task to “Provide the overall information technology leadership to the company.” The leader of the CIM group quickly realized the task was not possible without significant organizational change. After bringing in consultants to review the Information Management at Xerox, the director of CIM realized the Xerox IM infrastructure could not support the company’s strategic direction. To address the IM problems, CIM started a new initiative, “IM 2000”. The goal of IM 2000 was to move Xerox to a new information systems infrastructure.
The problems found with Information Management at Xerox
• Aging application portfolio built on proprietary technologies
• Large cost associated with keeping legacy system running
• Duplicate work caused by corporate culture – autonomy
The IM 2000 design team recommended the following four strategies
1. Reduce/Redirect
 Reduce overall costs by reining in the expense of legacy system. Use savings to fund new applications and infrastructure.
2. Infrastructure Management
 Move to a industry standard infrastructure that would be managed centrally – a client server environment.
3. Leverage worldwide IM resources
 Create library of shareable core modules.
4. Business process-driven solutions
 The current legacy system was to be replaced by solutions supporting new Xerox business process.
Xerox’s earlier quality initiatives had created a corporate culture used to having a partner relationship with suppliers. Because of this, management suggested IM should look at outsourcing as an alternative.
Typical Reasons for Outsourcing
• Concerns about Cost and Quality o Vendors save money by
 Running much leaner overhead structures than their customers
 More aggressive use of low cost labor pools (India)
 Staff must keep up to date on newest IT practices
 Purchasing Power
 More efficient use of capacity
In many cases outsourcing has proven to be beneficial for businesses. It can help a business’s management by allowing executives to focus on the core structure of the firm rather than every specific element. Production, manufacturing, or additional servic...
Xerox has always prided themselves as a customer-focused and employee-centered organization. Their rich heritage has helped with the company’s profitability and growth. Currently, Xerox is a $22 billion annual revenue multi-national business services and document management organization (Xerox, 2014). The mission statement for Xerox is “to become change agents and innovators - using Xerox Lean Six Sigma to constantly search for a better way to meet our customers' challenges and to create business process outsourcing, IT solutions, new technologies, products and services for world class commercial and government clients that enable better results” (Xerox, 2014). Throughout the years, the company has succeeded through the satisfaction it has provided to its customers. They provide quality and excellent product and services. The company values and empowers its employees to be the best in everything they do. Xerox has created inclusion in all aspects of its organizational culture. The current CEO; Ursula Burns, is the first African American woman to be appointed to the position. This promotion at that time was unheard off in the company. She started as a summer intern and worked her way up to her current position. She is a true meaning of diversity in the work place in modern America. Diversity at Xerox means success. This success has placed the company on the fortune 500 list (#131) of company for the year 2013 (Cable News Network (CNN), 2013).
Harkness, W. L. (1996, Sep). Process Improvement and Innovation in the Information Services Function: Lessons Learned at the Bose Corporation. pp. pp.349-368.
Importantly, we have discovered that female and male sexes within the same species have varied differences and varied similarities throughout our primate ancestry. This allows for hypotheses and predictions of why evolutionary changes occurred, but there is not one answer to, why we lack that degree of dimorphism, or why another primate has a high degree of dimorphism. While conclusions have been made, the biggest take from all of this is if trends in human evolution continue as they have been, eventually all that may be left is primary sex
According to John Mears, the most prominent features of the human species present themselves from the neck upwards. “Delicately configured, vertical faces with high foreheads, small brow ridges and teeth, reduced jaws, and prominent chins” (Mears) along with specialized vocal tracts that provide for the production of speech account define major characteristics that set humans apart from other apes visually. Apart from that humans are structurally similar to modern great apes. An obvious example would be opposable thumbs used for grasping and holding objects; A characteristic shared among many primates. Bipedalism is another major defining characteristic of modern humans however the ability to walk on two limbs is not limited to just humans. The great apes possess bipedal abilities but not on a permanent basis; rather they tend to alternate between bipedal and quadrupedal methods of movement whenever necessary. The differences between modern humans and the great apes (chimpanzees, bonobos, etc.) fall along more qualitative measure. For example, humans are not well known for their physical methods of attack. When faced with a predator or adversary, humans would not likely resort to biting or using teeth for attack because “their teeth, for instance are puny besides those of chimpanzees” (Ruse). Humans also very clearly present significantly less amounts of hair than the great apes do. One major quantitative difference however is in the genetics. On a chromosomal level the great apes exhibit 24 pairs while humans exhibit only 23 pairs. This difference however, could only really account for less than 5% of the difference in the genomes of humans and the great apes. According to Marion Dresner humans also share about 98.5% of DNA with that of Chimpanzees; although more current studies have shown the number to likely be closer to
The system should be able to incorporate more data storage space with minimum down time.
Although, Clendenin’s success at Xerox is credited due to his role and work at MDC sector, but the additional two year commitment doesn’t make any justice to Clendenin’s advancement in position at Xerox. For this, he had to deal with sheerness from Hewitt to cut down
2. by moving to OPEX to reduce CAPEX and pay model constantly to help reduce capital expenditure on software and hardware.
Mann (2015) maintains Robert Camp, a logistics engineer, became known as the leader of the benchmarking movement when he initiated the idea at Xerox. To increase its plummeting market share, Xerox Corporation underwent more than 230 process assessments to improve their business between 1981 and 1989. After accepting the concept, the company began to benchmark all aspects of their operations in an effort to improve quality, cost and productivity (Attiany, 2014). Their realization that success comes from superior practices across all companies, not just competitors, caused them to look beyond their competition to all companies for best practices, which included billing practices from American Express, Honda for supplier development, and Toyota for quality management to name a few (Mann, 2015). Further relayed by Mann (2015), was that in those eight years of adapting best practices, Xerox went from a crisis point in their organizational history to becoming a world leader in copiers. Because of its success at Xerox, benchmarking became a strategy known
For years studies and observations have been made on the relationship between body size and physical orientation of an animal. In 1847 Carl Bergmann was one of the first to do observations with this phenomenon (Dictionary of Theories 2002). Bergmann noticed that warm-blooded animals living at climates high in latitude are bigger in size than those living in climates of lower latitudes (Dictionary of Theories 2002). Research has shown there is a correlation of surface area to volume in animals that are located in different parts of the globe. Animals living in a cooler climate have a larger volume, but decreased surface area to retain as much body heat as possible. The inverse is true for animals living in warmer regions; these animals have a smaller volume and larger surface area to allow the body to cool efficiently (McNab 1971). Bergmann’s rule has brought valuable insight into the study of character traits and how we identify where animals originated. One example that I came across is with the Andean passerine bird, a study was done in 1991 by G. R. Graves. He noticed the size of ...
Outsourcing is a technique for companies to reassign specific responsibilities to external entities. There are several motivations for outsourcing including organizational, improvement, cost, and revenue advantages (Ghodeswar & Vaidyanathan, 2008).
I think, as a company grows bigger, like Eastman Kodak has, its business processes become complex, and in this case, its complexity includes outsourced services. I think Eastman Kodak can benefit from this and so can the allied partners. An example is given in the case over service deliver process in which it says, “a Kodak end user acquiring a personal computer from Business Land had to contact not only Business Land but also IBM to establish a mainframe account, and DEC to install network connections.” I think there are processes that have not been realized yet that can be supported by an automated system but can only be realized as time passes.
Per the director of research and development for Eastman Kodak Mark Schneider, says that the plan is not just to cut direct costs. When the Outsourcing Institute asked companies to name the top three reasons for going extramural, costs showed up on 64% of the lists. But improve company focus, access to world-class capabilities, and free resources for other purposes were each mentioned more than 40% of the time (Forbes.com, 2007). Often, a different objective is to minimize the time and distance between a supplier's parts bin and a retailer's cash register, dropping the amount of manufactured goods inventoried along the supply chain. Whatever the reasons, unless a company has a plan in place and a marketplace that will soak up enough output so that it can function at optimum rates and costs, the burden of proof has shifted from why outsource? To why make it here?
They are facing a severe capital expenditure problem. They couldn’t run new software on the equipment they purchased 2 years ago and it is no longer useful. They require a reliable, predictable usage – linked cost structure. They want to buy fewer boxes but get maximum capacity and coverage to stay competitive.
Over recent years companies have become less dependent on paper and more dependent on technology. Take American Honda Motors for example; the Davenport Parts facility recently converted computer systems to more efficiently manage its inventory. Prior to its new system months of preparation was needed in order to ensure a smooth change over. Without the four basic functions of management all working together success would not have been possible.