Eastman Kodak Co. Benchmark
Kodak is the world’s foremost imaging innovator. George Eastman put the first simple camera into the hands of a world of consumers in 1888. In so doing, he made a cumbersome and complicated process easy to use and accessible to nearly everyone. Since that time, the Eastman Kodak Company has led the way with an abundance of new products and processes to make photography simpler, more useful and more enjoyable. With sales of $13.3 billion in 2006, the company is committed to a digitally oriented growth strategy focused on helping people better use meaningful images and information in their life and work. (Kodak, 2007)
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?
Eastman Kodak has realized savings in the millions in transportation and inventory costs by implementing lean logistics. Kodak starting developing lean logistics in 2002 by establishing a cross docks to improve the flow of materials moving from its suppliers to its warehouses. Kodak picked three of its closes suppliers to try the lean logistics out. One main truck would go around to the suppliers and pick up supplies every two days and bring it back to the cross dock where it would be moved to the correct department. This one act has led to a $20 million inventory cost reduction because there is nothing being stored, and the shipping costs are low because they use their own trucks.
KLI could try a similar approach and have suppliers use the just-in-time (JIT) inventory system and keep levels high enough to sell out of products, but low enough to use residual space available.
Outsourcing simply means acquiring services from an external organization instead of using internal resources (Butler, 2000). By using outsourced resources, organizations can gain a competitive advantage by utilizing contingent staff to accomplish strategic goals without incurring the fixed overhead. By focusing on the leading edge and highly specialized skill sets, outsourcing providers can often offer higher quality services, or at a lower price than the client organization. Typical reasons for outsourcing go beyond simple contingent staffing. Outsourcing providers are able to maintain economies of scale with regard to specialization (...
The history of Eastman Kodak begins George Eastman wanted to simplify photography, so that everyone can enjoy capturing special moments and just want to limit this craft to trained professionals. George Eastman started on this quest in 1878; he was one of the first to demonstrate the convenience of dry plates. With dry plates, photographers would be able to expose and develop pictures when they wanted or needed to which made it more convenient, dry plates then went into mass production the following year in 1879 (Kodak n.d.) From there George Eastman continued to find ways to get photography into the hand of the people. After his demonstration of dry plates he then went on to invent the first roll holder for negative film and in1885 he invented the first transparent photographic film known as “roll film” that we know today. After this invention in 1888 Eastman Company changed its name to Kodak and produced a camera that can be used by everyone but it wasn’t until 1900 when he introduced the first of the famous Brownie Camera’s that made it financially affordable for virtually everyo...
Eastman Kodak Company is an American company focused on manufacturing photographic, print and film related products such as digital cameras, printers and scanners. It was founded in 1888 and is headquartered in New York, United States. In order to understand Kodak´s situation back in 1993 one has to know what the market was like at this time. Eastman Kodak Company was the strongest player in the early 1990s and Kodak Gold Plus was seen as the industry standard. In 1993, the US photo and film market consisted of 670 million 24-roll exposures whose prices ranged from $2.50 to $3.50, resulting in a total of approximately $2 billion. The industry was mature, leading to a 2% annual growth, and the market was relatively concentrated with four major players, namely, Kodak, Fuji, Agfa and 3M. Eastman Kodak Company and Fuji sold branded products, whereas Agfa and 3M sold the products b2b and b2c under private labels. Polaroid sourced its products from 3M.
For much of the nineteenth century, cameras were made in relatively small numbers; crafted out of expensive materials like brass, mahogany and leather, putting it out of the reach of the general public. The most significant event in amateur photography by far was the introduction of the Kodak camera in 1888, invented and marketed by American businessman and entrepreneur George Eastman. Eastman realized that there was a huge untapped market of people who wanted to take their own photographs if they were given the means to do so. The Kodak was...
Fuji Film and Kodak are industry leaders that have been common household names for more than a decade. Each company's web page (fujifilm.com and kodak.com) provides extensive time lines reflecting the history, development and growth of their global empires that would intrigue both avid and novice photographers alike. By comparison the companies may appear to be identical, however, there are proportionately vast differences in their approach to profitability, market adaptation, as well as their overall management ethics.
The market for instant film photography in the U.S. had matured. Sales in 1994 and 1995 had fallen 2 percent and 12 percent respectively. International sales, on the other hand, offered strong growth potential. With rising standards of living and no infrastructure to process 35 mm film in many emerging market countries, there was a large untapped market for instant photography. Polaroid's cameras were in high demand. Growth in int...
Kodak, a world renowned photography company created in the late 1880s, had it share of woes (Bolman & Deal, 2008). According to Bolman and Deal (2008), one hundred years after the company’s creation, Kodak was in trouble due to high prices, low customer approval and low employee morale. Chandler, Kodak’s CEO, dramatically destroyed a wooden podium with a large blade to demonstrate that the company needed to fundamentally change its operation (Bolman & Deal, 2008). One of the changes made at Kodak was the restructuring of its black and white film department (Bolman & Deal, 2008). The black and white department created streams or sections to support and serve the department (Bolman & Deal, 2008). According to Bolman and Deal
Kodak was painstaking the Google of many decades ago. It was founded in 1880 and known for its pioneering technology and advanced marketing. “You press the button, we do the rest,” was its slogan in 1888. By 1976 Kodak accounted for 90% of film and 85% of camera sales in America. Until the 1990s it was frequently rated one of the world's five most valuable brands (The Last Kodak Moment, 2012). The business was built based on four principles; mass production at low cost, international delivery, extensive advertising, and a focus on the customer. Kodak is no longer in the camera business. They have reorganized into three segments: Digital Printing and Enterprise, Graphics, Entertainment, and Commercial Films, and Personalized Imaging and document imaging.
Originally founded in 1880 by George Eastman, the Eastman Kodak company now stands as a leader in the infoimaging industry. Infoimaging is a $385 billion industry that consists of using traditional and digital film to allow people to capture and deliver images through cameras, computers, and the media. Currently under the direction of Chairman and CEO Daniel A. Carp, Eastman Kodak is divided into three major areas of production.
Although, Kodak tried very hard to catch up the latest trend and fight the new entrants, for instance, the digital cameras and...
The major new market that Kodak has to deal with at the minute is the implementation of digital electronics. Kodak’s fast acting in this area has made it an early market leader. However, market leading in this day and age is a lot harder than ever before, because of the amount of new entrants into the market. But with every up comes a down, and so too, this new market of digital posses a threat to Kodak, because it makes their traditional products obsolete. As the Asian and European markets are moving on to digital, it would seem that it would be the best area
In today’s world digital media are everywhere, TV, newspapers, advertisements, and magazines. Almost everywhere you look you will find some sort of digital technology. Digital technology has come along way since the beginning of its time in. Although computers were invented long before; digital technology didn’t start to shine its light until the early 80’s. Originally, NASA developed digital imaging for the US space program in the 1960s (History of the digital camera, 2001). NASA needed a reliable way to get photographs back from the probes, which were never to return to the Earth. George Lucas combined with Adobe to help start the digital art movement with the creation of Photoshop. Companies such as Adobe, Microsoft, Hewitt Packard, Kodak and Sony are a few of the top brands in digital design.
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).
In addition, at the time, the economy was doing great, therefore, using the push system to stock pile inventory was acceptable. However, during the dot-com bust of the 2000’s, its sales and the demand for its products greatly decreased. Unfortunately, during this time, Cisco discovered that it possessed an abundance of inventory, and, wrote off more than $1 billion in inventory. Consequently, the company learned that acquiring inventory in anticipation of market demand, and not factoring in the human element of its business increased its risks of failure. Obviously, Cisco wanted to meet its customer’s demands, however, the problem was that it held more inventory than what the customers were demanding. Nevertheless, afterwards, it knew that it needed to adopt a new, more efficient approach to inventory. Therefore, Cisco had to reevaluate its supply chain system and seek input from IT, customers, suppliers, and finance. Further, by including input from these sources, Cisco adopted the more efficient pull system. The pull system, is dependent upon producing smaller repeating orders. Rather than the push system, which relies on larger less repeating orders. Effective inventory management, when administered correctly, can reduce and keep the inventory to a more desired level. In addition, Cisco discovered that inventory management can reduce inventory levels, enhance cash flow and reduce overall
People always want to keep the prefect moments in their lives. So they invented cameras that the earliest invention which can help people to do that. Nowadays cameras have become a part of people¡¯s lives. Most of families own at least one camera. Wherever there is a party, a picnic, a wedding or something else, we use a camera to save the memories. With the development of technology, there is a new kind of camera which becomes a fashion all over the word. It named digital camera which is short for DC. Digital cameras are different form the traditional cameras. The biggest differentiation between the two cameras are digital cameras do not need films whilst tradition camera need. Compare with tradition camera, digital camera has more advantages for ordinary consumer than disadvantages. But people use the tradition cameras for more than 150 years, will they easily to accept the new camera? How to motivate consumer to buy digital cameras? Can the marketers create such a need to them? For this article, I would discuss the need and motivation of consumers, and show the answer about the questions above.