By designing global manufacturing networks still purely cost-based decisions are made, in which objectives such as delivery time, quality, flexibility, closeness to customer and coordination effort are neglected.
"The whole idea is to create a closeness between customers and designers," says Shualy.
Government is the arms industry's biggest customer and the MoD's closeness to its suppliers is widely known.
Closeness to the customer was also the aim of the engineering team that worked on the latest version of the Honda Odyssey minivan, which went on sale in 1998.
"In [our] case, it's genuinely helped enhance our knowledge base of our customers and get a sense of closeness with [them]," says Rose Kaggwa, director of business and scientific services at the National Water and Sewerage Corporation in Uganda, one of the continent's star performers.
The results indicate that freight demand, closeness to market, production area, customers, and transportation costs are regarded as the most important factors in deciding the location of logistics centers.
The CMO is closest to the the customer and most in touch with the marketplace a closeness that can translate into enhancements in the client experience that will provide business results.
In e-commerce, closeness to and a maniacal focus on, the customer is everything.
For a supply chain, competition between firms involves attracting as many customers as possible, and the factors which could be important for costumers are price, closeness, and quality of service; consequently, a retailer has a defined utility for a specific customer.
In this paper, two factors of price and closeness have been considered to construct a function for customer's utility.
