WMBA 6060 Week 8 Corrected Plan and Retrospective Example

The Corrected Uptime Plan and a Retrospective on Its Weakest Flank: Where a Distributor Could Hit a Dental Service Firm Hardest, Which Assumption to Test First and How Leaving Solo Practices Behind Looks Now

Student Name

Walden University

WMBA 6060: Marketing for Competitiveness

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

The Corrected Uptime Plan and a Retrospective on Its Weakest Flank: Where a Distributor Could Hit a Dental Service Firm Hardest, Which Assumption to Test First and How Leaving Solo Practices Behind Looks Now

Corrections

Reviewers of the Week 7 plan for Kettle River Dental Technologies, the composite Twin Cities equipment service firm used in this course, raised three issues, and the plan has been corrected for each.

First, reviewers asked whether 22 technicians can absorb 70 new preventive contracts without breaking the four-hour promise. They can, by a margin worth stating. Each five-operatory contract needs about 14 hours of preventive work a year, so 70 contracts add about 980 hours, roughly half of one technician's year. The larger load is emergency calls, which plan customers may make more often because they expect a fast answer. The corrected plan adds a hiring trigger: if on-time response for multi-dentist calls drops under 90 percent two months running, the firm hires one technician based in the fastest-growing outer county.

Second, reviewers questioned the value ceiling of about $107 per operatory per month, built on owners' estimates of lost production. The corrected plan reports the ceiling as a range, about $70 to $107, reflecting a more cautious assumption that the plan cuts downtime exposure by 25 to 40 percent. The $59 price remains below even the low end.

Third, reviewers noted that the renewal target of 85 percent had no basis. The corrected plan bases it on Kettle River's existing contract renewals among multi-dentist practices, which ran at 88 percent last year, and keeps 85 percent as a conservative first-year target for a new product.

Retrospective: Where the Plan Is Most Exposed

The plan's weakest flank is not a rival matching the four-hour promise. It is a rival changing the comparison. The national distributors sell supplies to most multi-dentist practices every week, and their service departments could offer preventive contracts at or below cost to practices that buy a certain volume of supplies. A practice that receives "free" preventive maintenance with its glove and composite orders would compare Kettle River's $59 with zero, not with $45 to $60.

That response would be costly for a distributor, but it would play to its strengths, the supply relationship, rather than Kettle River's. The plan's best answer is the one it already has: an unqualified response promise, with a published record, for the failures that cost practices most. A bundled contract does not change how quickly a distributor's technician arrives. If bundling appears, Kettle River should emphasize the cost of a lost day, not its own price, and offer a response-only contract without preventive visits for practices that take preventive work from a distributor. Porter (1980) described how firms with different strengths respond to competitive moves in ways that reflect those strengths, and Kettle River should expect the distributors to respond through supplies, where they are strong.

The Assumption to Test First

Of the term's assumptions, the one I would test first is the size of the target segment. The plan assumes about 18 percent of private offices, roughly 200, have three or more dentists, based on Kettle River's customer list adjusted for its underrepresentation among solo offices. If the true share is 12 percent, the segment holds about 135 offices, and a target of 70 new contracts would mean winning more than half of the practices the firm does not already serve, which is not credible. Counting dentists at fifty randomly picked addresses through the state licensing board's public search would take a few hours and should happen before the sales coordinator is hired.

The second assumption to test is owners' estimates of lost production. Practices tend to remember their worst days, so the estimates may run high. A simple check is to ask three customers for their scheduling records on a day of equipment failure and count canceled appointments.

How the Exclusion Looks Now

Week 3 chose to leave solo and two-dentist practices unserved, along with offices tied to dental support organizations. After eight weeks of building the plan around that choice, I would keep the first exclusion and soften the second.

Excluding solo practices still looks right. Every element of the plan, the response promise, the per-operatory price and the downtime report, makes the most sense where several providers stop at once. A solo practice values speed too, but its loss is smaller and its budget is tighter, and pursuing it would pull technicians toward many short, low-value visits. The plan's correction of the loyalty rate, limiting it to multi-dentist customers, showed how easily the excluded segment can creep back in.

The exclusion of chain-affiliated offices looks less certain. Some dental support organizations with five or six Twin Cities offices allow local managers to choose service providers below a spending threshold. Those groups behave more like multi-dentist independents than like national chains. The corrected plan therefore adds a narrow exception: the sales coordinator may approach regional groups headquartered in the metro whose offices choose their own vendors, while continuing to avoid national contracts. Day (1994) emphasized that market-driven firms keep learning about how their customers actually buy, and this exception is a small example of that learning.

The Corrected Plan in Brief

With the corrections, the plan stands as follows. The target remains independent practices with three or more dentists, now joined by locally managed regional dental groups. The four-hour promise, with its free-visit remedy, stays unchanged, now protected by a hiring trigger. The Uptime Plan remains at $59 per operatory per month with a four-operatory minimum. The channel budget remains about $56,000, led by the firm's own technicians. The first-year target remains 70 contracts, to be revised after the segment-share check.

Looking Back on the Method

Starting over, I would test the segment share in Week 3 instead of estimating it. Every later decision, the target number of contracts, the channel budget and the hiring trigger, rests on that estimate, and it was the one figure I could have checked cheaply and did not. Barney (1991) argued that resources must be valuable and rare to support an advantage; the same discipline applies to assumptions, which should be checked before they become the foundation of a plan.

References

Barney, J. (1991). Firm resources and sustained competitive advantage. Journal of Management, 17(1), 99-120. https://doi.org/10.1177/014920639101700108

Day, G. S. (1994). The capabilities of market-driven organizations. Journal of Marketing, 58(4), 37-52. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224299405800404

Porter, M. E. (1980). Competitive strategy: Techniques for analyzing industries and competitors. Free Press.