ABSTRACT

Industrial or business marketing has always been something of a stepchild. Even though early textbooks date back to the 1930s, the existence of business marketing as a field of study has come under attack in the past (Fern and Brown 1984) and continues to occupy what appears to be a very minor place in most marketing curricula. Perhaps one of the major changes in the past ten to fifteen years has been the increasing focus on business processes and their improvement. The fundamental point of the theory of constraints is simply that each and every process has a constraint in it that limits the ability of that process to reach the goal. Process improvement has two very important constructs that drive it. One is synchronization and the other is standardization.