Extension Cord
Features
Introduction Complication The problems with new product introductions in apple
by Jacob Saslavsky
A
costumer walks into an apple store to get his new iPod and is consumed by all of the iPhones, iPads, iPods, and laptops in the store. They never would have thought of how difficult it must be to orchestrate the process of releasing the new apple products, or how hard it is to get them where they need to be on time. For people like Laurie Weinstein this process is their life. Laurie Weinstein manages the new product introductions from operations standpoint for apple in the Americas. She always has work getting apple products to stores. She is also constantly dealing with the difficulties associated with product introductions. “I manage the new product introductions from operations standpoint. So that means that any shippable product that launches at apple an accessory a mac an iPad, iPhone iPod. What my team does is it makes sure it gets into all of our channels. The online
store, retail any reseller and making sure that it’s in all the stores when it should be at the time of the product launch.” Weinstein said. With a team of only 17 and 4-5 products being worked on at a time, working long hours is typical, and problems occur often. The little amount of time they have at times doesn’t help.
product. We do not want to land the product to early in the store so if we announce on Tuesday we do not want it to be there before Monday because if it is there over the weekend there might be people that do not understand the process they grab it from the back of the store and start selling it. So something that has gone wrong before in the past is that we have shipped and landed
“Some time I have as much as a few months. Normally, I know about something four weeks in advance, sometimes I have a couple of days [to get a product released],” “Some time I have as much as a few months. Normally, I know about something four weeks in advance, sometimes I have a couple of days [to get a product released],” Weinstein said. “Usually with every launch there is some problem but hopefully they are very small. The exact timing is tricky. So we will be very specific when we want to land the product in the retail stores. Usually we want it to be available at retail at that moment we announce early in the mourning a lot of the times so that when the stores open you can just go in and buy the
the product too early but luckily when it happens with our retail stores since they are apple stores we just tell them to hold it in the back we call it backahouse so they just hold it in the back of the store.” The real problem is when the retail store is not an apple store but instead is a BestBuy or some other store like that. When that happens they have to bring lots of people to make sure the store will not sell the product early. If the product does get sold early, since apple is such a large well known company, some person will blog about it and then more people who see that blog will blog and talk about it causing many mad people who want their iPhone or whatever it is early. “There have been times I have worked 48 hours straight on a project,” Weinstein said. “It is all so that people are getting what they want when we said they would be getting it.” As in many cases it is the people behind the scenes getting the important work done so that the people are happy. 1
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Fall 2011 Extension Cord 6