Decision Options

Whistler Corporation's president, Charles Stott, should take a few actions to overcome current weaknesses of the company and to make Whistler more competitive in the long term. Whistler Corp was successful in its business until 1985 because the radar detector market was not going through intensive price competition. However, after 1985, the price competition became severe and Whistler Corporation could not catch up with this change. As a result, it decreased its market share from 21% to 12%. The circumstance has forced Whistler Corporation to consider an alternative approach of different product development from their market research by leveraging their resources. Following the successful pilot of a new manufacturing process, Stott came up with three possible alternative courses of action:

1. Move all manufacturing plants to off-shore

2. Restructure domestic manufacturing plants

3. Move only low-end production to offshore.

Decision Criteria & Critique of Other Options

1. Keeping Whistler’s strengths in Design and Electrical Invention.

2. Expansion of radar detector market.

Reengineer domestic production:

Considering the recent market shrink, Stott should close domestic manufacturing plants. Even if Whistler could enhance its domestic manufacturing efficiency by introducing The RACE-ME Program, the total amount of business of radar detectors would decrease and its profitability would also decrease as long as the market shrinks. Although The RACE-ME Program will work while the market scale is big enough, this program will not work under small market scale. Under shrinking markets, Whistler Corporation cannot recapture its introducing costs by sales profits because introducing The RACE-ME Program to all domestic plants would be too much of an investment. In addition, the data record from this program is only for two