Global Operations Management

Chapter 2 discusses operations strategy and competitiveness. Operation strategy can be viewed as part of a planning process that coordinates operational goals with those of the larger organization (p. 24).

There are seven major competitive dimensions that form the competitive position of a firm, they are as follow: cost or price, quality, delivery speed, delivery reliability, coping with changes in demand, flexibility and new product introduction speed, and other product-specific criteria (PP. 25-27). A strategic position is not sustainable unless there are compromises with other positions. Trade-offs occurs when activities are incompatible so that more of one thing necessitates less of another (p. 27). Order winners and order qualifiers describe marketing-oriented dimensions that are keys to competitive success. Order winners are the criteria that differentiate the products and services of one firm from another, where as order qualifiers are the criteria that permit the firms products to be considered as candidates for purchase by customers (pp. 27-28).

The task of developing a comprehensive strategy for a firm is complex. Robert Kaplan and David Norton developed a Generic Strategy Map Template that is a starting point for the strategy design process and is tailored for a particular firm. In Kaplan and Norton's Generic Strategy Map, there are four perspectives on the template: financial, customer, internal, and learning and growth, in no specific order of importance (pp. 28-32).

There are four steps in developing a manufacturing strategy: segment the market according to the product group, identify the product requirements, demand patterns and profit margins of each group, determine order qualifiers and winners for each group, and convert order winners into specific performance requirements (pp.34-36). Productivity is a common measure on how well resources are being used by a country, industry or business, in the broadest sense it is defined as the following ratio: outputs/inputs (p. 39).

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