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Order-Winners and Order-Qualifiers

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The concept of order-winners and order-qualifiers is originating from an attempt to explain how internal operational capabilities can lead to competitive advantage, market success and answer the following :

- What drives customers in buying the products manufactured by a company at all.
- What makes customers purchase a certain product instead of a similar one manufactured by a competitor.

In order for customers to purchase a product a car for example it needs to meet a set of minimum requirements. In the case of a car it could be design(color, number of doors), a good running engine, at least 3 years warranty,etc. For a PC it could be again design, the minimum hardware requirements to install the desired Operating System and run …show more content…

For the same reason, order-winners can also over time become order-qualifiers if characteristics such as as high quality,customization, or excellent service are getting to represent the minimum acceptable level for all competitors.

The terms 'order winners' and 'order qualifiers' were first conceptualized by Terry Hill, see Hill, T. (1985) with the aim of helping managers 'to improve understanding about markets and to develop a consistent manufacturing strategy'.
Apart from the mentioned understanding and development of strategy, for managers in any organization it is also important to incorporate these terms into their mission statement. The aim is to explain and clarify what the performance objectives are, and to focus everyones efforts in accomplishing these objectives.

It has to be mentioned that despite of their popularity, these concepts have also been the target of some criticism. First of all because the order-winners concept is bound to a short-term perspective of a marketplace. In practice, for strategic reasons long-term relationsships will exists between purchasers or suppliers despite of a temporary diminishing quality of certain order-winners and order-qualifiers. Secondly because the concept was based merely on individual customers for individual orders instead of considering larger

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