Page 116 - Operations Strategy

Chapter
3 Substitutes for strategy

Introduction
Most chief operating officers (or whoever is in charge of the operations function) like
to think that they have an important impact on their organsisation’s success (which
they do) and that they have an operations strategy that ensures this (which they may
not). Some will not even know what is meant by ‘operations strategy’, some will have
a clearly worked out and thought through articulation of how they reconcile market
requirements with operations resource capabilities. But there are also some who are
likely to mention one of the ‘new approaches’ to operations that they have picked up,
or been sold by consultants, or have judged to be particularly appropriate in improving
their operations performance. Such responses might include, ‘We are trying to make
our operations as lean as possible’ or ‘We are reengineering our operations to avoid
organisational silos’. But are these approaches to operations strategy as such, or are
they merely substitutes for strategy? In this chapter we will examine some of these
approaches and the extent to which they can be seen as ‘strategic’, as well as discussing
how they fit into operations strategy (see Figure 3.1).

Figure 3.1 this chapter concerns how some organisations use ‘approaches’ to operations
improvement as substitutes for strategy

Relative TQM Relative
importance of Lean importance of
the operations Performance objectives the market
resource Six requirements
perspective Sigma BPR perspective

Decision areas

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