Operations Management For Competitive Advantage Pdf LINK Free Download

[Bernarda Zahra]

Lasting competitive advantages tend to be things competitors cannot easily replicate or imitate. Warren Buffet calls sustainable competitive advantages economic moats, which businesses can figuratively dig around themselves to entrench competitive advantages. This can include strengthening one's brand, raising barriers to new entrants (such as through regulations), and the defense of intellectual property.

Operations Management For Competitive Advantage Pdf Free Download

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A competitive advantage is something that cannot be easily replicated and is exclusive to a company or business. This value is created internally and is what sets the business apart from its competition.

Michael Porter, the famous Harvard Business School professor, identified three strategies for establishing a competitive advantage: cost leadership, differentiation, and focus (which includes both cost focus and differentiation focus)[1].

A company's competitive advantage is its ability to provide a product or service that is different from and better than its competitors. There are many ways for a company to achieve a competitive advantage, including lower costs, better quality, faster delivery, more innovation, and greater customer loyalty. However, the most sustainable competitive advantages are difficult for competitors to replicate.

Operations management is a key strategic activity for any company looking to create a competitive advantage. By designing and executing operational processes that enable a company to produce, distribute, and sell its products more efficiently and effectively than its rivals, operations management can differ between success and failure. Good operations management can help a company reduce its costs, improve product quality, shorten lead times, increase customer satisfaction, and become more agile in the face of competition. Conversely, poor operations management can lead to missed deadlines, production bottlenecks, inventory overloads, and dissatisfied customers. So it's clear that having a well-run operations department is critical for any business looking to stay ahead of the pack.

Obstacles facing companies in today's hyper-competitive global markets are seemingly more complex than ever, to the point that managers must rethink many of the basic principles of good operations management, says Robert Hayes.

So the book's first section, on operations strategy, focuses on how a company can go about creating an operations organization and approach that best fits and supports a particular business's economic environment and chosen competitive strategy.

None has chosen a highly unusual competitive strategy. For example, lots of companies try to compete on the basis of low cost, or high reliability, or fast response. All have risen to industry dominance because they adopted and followed a consistent, coherent strategy for operations, and through operating superiority have been able to achieve lower cost, better reliability, or faster responsiveness than their competitors have been able to provide.

It is a long-held understanding that each major decision that needs to be made within the operations of an organization will include a trade-off because it is impossible for any one organization to excel on all the competitive priorities at once! An example is a manufacturer who competes on the basis of cost. In order to reduce defects, they may choose to change one of their input components for one with a better quality. This however will increase their costs. Cost and quality are common trade-offs. Flexibility and speed are also considered trade-offs. When organizations increase their number of options and varieties, it adds operational complexity. This will slow down their operations.

Core competencies are the resources and capabilities that comprise the strategic advantages of a business. A modern management theory argues that a business must define, cultivate, and exploit its core competencies in order to succeed against the competition.

In most corporations, there are several levels of management. Strategic management is the highest of these levels in the sense that it is the broadest and applies to all parts of the firm while also incorporating the longest time horizon. It gives direction to corporate values, corporate culture, corporate goals, and corporate missions. Under this broad corporate strategy there are typically business-level competitive strategies and functional unit strategies.[6]

Business strategy refers to the aggregated strategies of a single business firm or a strategic business unit (SBU) in a diversified corporation. According to Michael Porter, a firm must formulate a business strategy that incorporates either cost leadership, differentiation or focus in order to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage and long-term success in its chosen arenas or industries.

Operations strategy categories can be broken down into many types of areas that must be addressed. The decisions made in these areas will determine whether the business strategy is executed. Below is a list of 10 critical decisions in operations management[8]:

There are also advantages in trade agreements. Agreements between the United States and other countries that make trade free, lower tariffs, or otherwise reduce costs may be less visible to the general public, shareholders, and other stakeholders, but are something of which operations managers need to be aware. The World Trade Organization (WTO) has helped reduce tariffs to an average of 3 percent today, down from 40 percent in the 1940s. This is a huge cost savings and should be explored. Some such trade agreements are NAFTA (USA, Canada, Mexico), APEC (the Pacific Rim countries), MERCOSUR (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay), and SEATO (Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea, New Guinea, and Chile), just to name a few.

A key factor in any of those strategies and tasks is to establish competitive advantage. What makes your goods or service more unique than anyone else who may offer the same? Competitive advantage is the creation of an exclusive advantage over competitors.

The three concepts of differentiation, cost, and response come into play as operations managers make good decisions in the seven major functional areas of operations management, otherwise known as operations decisions.

The SWOT analysis is a great tool with which to start. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. This is critical to establishing competitive advantage. The purpose of a SWOT analysis is to maximize opportunities and minimize threats in the environment, while maximizing advantages of the organization strengths and minimizing its weaknesses. This should be constantly evaluated against the successes of the firm.

Core competencies are the set of skills, talents and activities that a firm does extremely well. These are the building blocks for competitive advantage and set it apart. Here are some questions to help determine core competencies:

Operations management involves the planning and production of goods or services offered by a business, and requires careful planning in the form of an operations strategy. An effective management strategy involves determining how labor, materials, and technology can be best harnessed for efficient output.

Supply chain constitutes about 40 to 80 percent of operational cost. To be competitive in a dynamic and highly cost-sensitive environment such as Nigeria, three key competitive operational priorities of cost, quality, and speedy delivery of service and products are essential for business continuity and survival. Disruptions are inherent in the business ecosystem, but operations executives that proactively leverage on using the lean supply chain as a comparative advantage would attain an operational edge. Recall that operations would serve as an organisational competitive advantage only if an organisation distinctively elicits competence in executing similar strategies better than its competitors. Only organisations that strive to deploy acumen regarding the critical aspects of their operational architecture would be competitive in terms of optimal value delivery to their customers.

Strategy is not synonymous with operational excellence. Operational excellence exists in the ability of an organisation to grow its value stream vis-à-vis competitive priorities of speedy delivery, low-cost, innovation, flexibility, and consistent quality. These competitive operational attributes may become elusive due to the suboptimal nature of the supply chain value stream flow. Thus, the following operational tactics can be adopted by operations leaders or executives in both service and product-based organisations:

This indispensable text offers students a high quality treatment of strategic operations management. It provides the reader with a clear understanding of the importance and nature of operations strategy by determining exactly which management activities, core competencies, resources and technologies underpin an operational strategy. The book demonstrates how various operational elements and components can be combined and customised into unique operational strategies. When these strategies are correctly implemented, they provide sustainable competitive advantage and allow firms to provide a diverse range of services and goods in their increasingly demanding, complex and dynamic marketplaces and spaces.
Includes chapters covering customising operational strategies for retail, manufacturing, services and SMEs, and sections on eBusiness and complexity theory in relation to operations theory.
Features include:
*extended case-studies including several from Europe and the USA
*case vignettes
*learning objectives
*key terms
*chapter introduction and 'maps' to aid reader accessibility
*'time out' boxes to prompt the reader to reflect on what has been learnt
*'critical reflection' boxes that analyse theories and models.

'Useful teaching text for students concerned with strategic operations management. Includes well-structured learning objectives and discussion questions as well as case studies and website support.' - Long Range Planning

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