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Operation Strategy

Satisfactory Essays

1. “Operations can make or break a business”. For an organization, operations include all the activities necessary for the fulfillment of customer requests, not just manufacture, also marketing, HRM, accounting, etc (Slack, Chambers and Johnston 2007, p5). Through operations, business provide products and service by changing inputs to outputs. Operations excellence is fundamental to strategic success. And according to Skinner (1969), operations management (OM) can contribute to better company performance like reduced cost, increased revenue, etc. As a kind of understanding, whether a company has good operation strategies and management is one important factor that can “make” or “break” a business.

Operations strategy (OS) can guide the …show more content…

This is the time when operations “make” a business. However, market requirement is changing, operations must be changing too, Hagen Style did not so suitable for the market later. Although board managers felt really good about the Hagen style, they started to consider adjusting OS when direct marketing using door-to-door representatives was increasingly regard as an old fashioned market channel. It can be inferred that if nothing was done to adapt to market, the operations would “break” the business.

The content above explains how operations can be influenced by OS/OM that a company is able to achieve good performance and respond to market requirements. From another perspective, OS/OM can also be considered as an operational instrument to gain those competitive advantages defined at strategic business unit level (Hayes and Wheelwright, 1984, Corbett and Van Wassenhove 1993). From the resource-based view, competitive advantages over the long term can be gained through an efficient way to allocate operations resources (Slack, Chambers and Johnston 2007,p73). This statement is proved right in the Heathrow Terminal 5 (T5) and Dubai Terminal 3 (T3) launches (Slack and Lewis 2011,p45).

Both T5 and T3 opened in 2008 but they got totally different results: the T5 opening is a chaos and T3 opening is a big success. Although both of the two terminals cost a lot to built, the building designs were amazing

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