Final Customer Purchasing from the Product Producer

Use Steps: Use steps include all the customer's value added activities or the consumption of the product itself. These steps include all the costs the customer incurs in employing the product in its intended use.

B.
Resources: Reduce resources required for the use of the product

3.
Energy: Reduce the energy the customer uses with the product

A. Effort – Reduce the physical constraints on the customer

Overcome physical limitations of the user
Alter dimensions
Make product smaller

Reduce size of individual use

No. SIC Year Note
1 2052 1991 Nabisco has new mini-Oreos: bite-size.
2 2086 2004 For convenience, Pepsi and Coca-Cola are packaging drinks in smaller boxes that fit into refrigerators more easily. In addition, an 8 ounce drink is aimed at younger and older consumers who want smaller portions.
3 2519 2005 Furniture is shrinking. The main problem Drexel Heritage had was huge furniture. Younger homeowners moving into smaller, older, renovated houses and senior citizens moving into condos have pushed the downsizing trend.
4 3500 2002 Palm Inc has lured engineers from Motorola and Nokia to shrink the handhelds, make them lighter and increase their battery life to attract business travelers.
5 3571 2004 Three companies, OQO, Vulcan, and Antelope Technologies are making tiny computers. They're all less than 6 inches wide and weigh less than a pound, but pack all the punch of a big PC.
6 3571 1999 At the light end of the PC laptop market is a group of machines weighing just three or four pounds. At the heavy end weights approach 10 pounds.
7 3572 2003 For nearly 16 years, floppy drives have remained the same. However, the floppy drive may have finally met its match in small, high-capacity storage devices called USB flash memory drives. They pack 16 MB or more of storage into a thumb-sized device that many companies sell as a key chain accessory. But, unlike cheap floppy disks, a low-end 16 MB USB drive costs about $20.
8 3577 2004 Three new digital music players entered the market in hopes of slowing Apple's domination with its hit iPod. The iPod Mini holds 1,000 songs, costs $249 and comes in five colors. Manufacturers believe that most users do not need to carry more than 1,000 songs and smaller devices will be well accepted. All three devices tested have a longer battery life, larger storage capacity and are compatible with songs sold in Microsoft's file format. The Rio Carbon is small and sleek but oddly shaped. It is lighter than the Mini. It operates off a five-way play control on the front and a jog dial on the top. The display is dimmer and smaller than the Mini's.
9 3633 2004 At Whirlpool, a cross company team studied the changing demographics of the American household and came up with a radically new concept.–make a small dishwasher as convenient to use as a microwave oven. The result was the Briva, an in-sink dishwasher that can wash and dry a small load of dishes in five minutes.
10 3651 2002 The portable MP3 players' music files were stored on flash memory, making players light, compact and skip-proof. But the high cost of flash memory limited storage capacity. Fast forward to October 2001, when Apple introduced the iPod with a 5-GB hard drive, enough capacity for about 1,000 songs. The iPod wasn't the first hard-drive portable music player, but the iPod was the first that was small and light enough to rival flash-memory players.
11 3651 2002 The Rio Riot digital music player, which is Windows and Mac compatible, is a decent portable jukebox and comes from Sonicblue, the company that makes the market-leading flash MP3 players. The player is about the same size as a paperback book and weighs 10 ounces.
12 3651 2002 Apple has several new models of its iPod, with a 10-GB model priced at $400 and a 20-GB model costing $500. And new touch-wheel controller enabled Apple to make the 10-GB iPod slightly thinner than the original.
13 3661 2004 The new RAZR V-3 cell phone from Motorola is 3.9 inches long, 2 inches wide and half an inch thick when folded, weighing only 3.4 ounces. A large color screen inside measures 2.2 inches diagonally and the small color screen on the outside can be used as a viewfinder for the camera.
14 3674 2002 The Fluidigm electronic chips are a smaller version of a very large- and very expensive- process. Its chip can host tens of thousands or experiments simultaneously.
15 3674 2003 Power Integrations has been profitable through the downturn in the semiconductor industry due its silicon designs, which are smaller, lighter and more energy efficient than standard copper- and iron-based technology but cost end customers the same.
16 3674 2001 Code-named Tualatin, the new Pentium III will be the world's first high-volume chip built with an advanced manufacturing process known as .13 micron. That means its circuits will be significantly smaller than those on the .18-micron Athlon 4.

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