Every entrepreneur wants his business to advance and win business competition in the long term, one of the keys to success is to fulfill market desires by creating products that have unique selling points or advantages that other competitors do not have. The survey conducted by the Startup Genome (2019) showed that nine out of ten businesses around the world that were just started (startups) failed to make a profit and eventually went bankrupt, one of the main reasons in the survey was not achieving product market fit (PMF), namely products or services that cannot meet consumer preferences.
From this, on 6-7 October 2022 a Community Service was held between the Maranatha Business Club (MBC) under the Department of Management Program of the Faculty of Business, Maranatha Christian University and Santa Maria 1 High School Cirebon featuring Dr. Jahja Hamdani Widjaja as the speaker with the topic “Product & Process Design For Your Business”. The participants involved in this activity were those in grades 11 and 12 of 2022/2023 academic year. Some of them already had business ideas, for example, a beauty business, a restaurant and selling online. Basically, they had a great passion to start a business, but they still lack knowledge of how to design business processes, especially related to product issues that could be accepted by target consumers. In this activity, Mr. Jahja gave material on process and product planning according to market demand.
At the beginning of his presentation session, Mr. Jahja explained that business is the process of creating value (ideas) by entrepreneurs to capture the value desired by the market or consumers. One of the important things to capture market-oriented value is that marketers are able to create or design products according to market desires. To realize the creation of products that are in accordance with the wishes of the market, it is necessary to use appropriate and systematic methods and processes so that they can be carried out efficiently and effectively. The steps include: (1) determining the target market, (2) recognizing market trends and needs, (3) determining specifications/sizes related to what the market wants/needs, (4) designing products based on their level of importance for consumers (quality function development). The conclusion at the end of his presentation session was that by designing both product and process designs, he was able to harmonize consumers’ desires with the company's capabilities.
The topic presented by Mr. Jahja was expected to be an answer to the problems faced by students, especially in designing products and business processes, both businesses that were already running and/or still in the stage of preparing business concepts. Product and process design is one of the factors of excellence for a business. To support students' understanding of the topics presented, Mr. Jahja also gave examples of real cases that occurred in a company related to product and process design problems (Murty, 2015).
In the Q&A session, one of the Qatarina students from class 12 IPA 1 asked, “How to make the products sold by the company continue to grow, while the problem that occurs is that the sellers sell the same or similar products?” For this question, Mr. Jahja gave an answer that even though every businessman is in the same market, we should see it from a different perspective, so that we as business people can find different and distinctive ways to find market needs that are not necessarily seen in the same way by others. For example by conducting deeper market research to consumers about what they want for the marketed products so that we get a lot of input regarding these consumer preferences. Businessmen who are able to “read” this market will win the competition.
