Beyond the Traditional Approach
Sound familiar? No matter how relevant or valid the audit’s individual findings, its conclusions were faulty and unproductive. Its analysis failed to see that the Unitech’s long string of problems was not the result of bad luck or unexplainable misfortune but of an explicit commitment to a familiar but outmoded and dysfunctional approach to new product development. In its simplest form, this approach calls for engineering to design products to meet the price and performance criteria set by marketing—and for manufacturing to meet the resulting delivery schedules and cost targets.
Purchasing, to the extent that it figures at all in the traditional view of new product development summarized in Exhibit I, has the task of ensuring the timely availability of required supplies and services and of obtaining them at economic prices. Hidden in this allocation of effort are three dicey assumptions about the nature and role of procurement: