Changing face of leading industry (part 1)

Manufacturing companies create value by acquiring raw materials and using them to produce something useful. Retailers bring together a range of products and present them in a way that's convenient to customers, sometimes supported by services such as fitting rooms or personal shopper advice. And insurance companies offer policies to customers that are underwritten by larger re-insurance policies. Here, they're packaging these larger policies in a customer-friendly way, and distributing them to a mass audience.

Throughout history, redefining processes have changed the business landscape.
For example, when Henry Ford introduced the assembly line, he redefined
manufacturing completely by making production flow the core of the
manufacturing process. Frederick Taylor’s Scientific Management introduced
the systematic analysis of workflows, and as Peter Drucker comments, ‘all the
productivity gains of the twentieth century can be explained by the work Taylor set
in motion at the century’s beginning’.

Toyota Motors consolidated the total quality management movement, just?in?time
manufacturing, and lean production into a competitive edge that pushed European
and U.S. car makers into a decade of retrenchment and catch?up. Wal?Mart began,
and Dell took forward, a total transformation of logistics processes. Over 20 years,
this reduced the percentage of gross domestic product in the USA, tied up in supply
chain management costs, by over 40 percent.

The diversity of customer expectations in service based industries make is a bit tough to define and implement a "silver bullet" process than that of manufacturing. usually in manufacturing, product inputs are generally uniform and barely change especially when the output required is expected to be same.