Bose Corporation Case

Bose Corporation

Hi-Fi Leader Stretches to Meet

Growth Challenges

Patricia E. Moody

No. of suppliers

No. of parts

Each of three legs - technology,

manufacturing, marketing - must grow

equally as the company grows. If one leg

is shorter or weaker than the others, the

company collapses.

and bad times, there are always people

wanting quality products. If you have

them, your business will survive better

than if you simply compete on lowest cost.

Bose's strategy has been to combine

technology with creative people to develop

products that offer high performance, and

are simple to use, yet sophisticated. To

compete successfully against other companies

ten or twenty times larger, Bose

must be "on a balanced base."

MANUFACTURING

How well products are MARKETING

made, manufacturing's Educating the

flexibility consumer to

the products'

benefits

TECHNOLOGY

Product concepts,

new technology.

R&D

How does Bose keep customers like Honda

and Nissan in]apan, Mercedes and GM in

the United States happy? According to

company President Sherwin Greenblatt,

there are lots of paths to success. What he

gives employees is "a framework of freedom."

That means getting good people

and paying them well, but mostly giving

them the opportunity, within businessdriven

parameters, to be creative.

Creat/rlf, at Work

Bose Corporation, the brainchild of

MIT-professor Dr. Amar Bose, was founded

in 1964 in Natick, MA. Year one, Mr.

Greenblatt, Bose's first andonlyemployee,

swept floors, answered phones, prepared

proposals for government electronics contracts,

and did R&D. Year two, the company

started to build product.

According to Mr. Greenblatt, the company

has been "lucky" to pioneer technology

applications for new products.

Their 901 speaker in 1968 led the way for

small, true high-fidelity speakers. Recently,

the auto sound system market has

opened up new market segments. Other

acoustics applications await - noise-canceling

headsets, and industrial uses, for

example.

Says Mr. Greenblatt, in good times

About Bose

Revenues $400 million. one-third to Japan

Growth rate 25% per yr, compounded

Founded 1964, privately held

No. of plants 6

No. of employees 3000 worldwide,

850 Framingham. MA

450

5000

Tough customers, those JIT

automakers, looking for

deliveries within aone-hour

window. But Bose Corporation,

the Massachusettsbased

global supplier of

consumer electronics, is

meeting the challenge.

17

Winter 1991

Lance Dixon, Sherwin Greenblatt, and Tom Beeson.

Technology

When the industry was moving toward bigger

and bigger speakers, non-expert customers asked,

"Why do we have to have speakers that take over

our living room?" Technology provided the answer.

The company will continue to look to engineering

to advance product and process technologies.

Manufacturing

Tom Beeson, Bose's vice president of manufacturing,

names three achievements he is most

proud of - success in the OEM automobile business

satisfying Japanese customers, Bose's ability

to satisfy demands of the component audio business,

and electronics automation and integration.

Three years ago the manufacturing leg had

great difficulty keeping up with very cyclical component

audio demand. Parts came from diverse

locations - Framingham, Mexico, the Far East.