Page 117 - Operations Strategy

92 CHAPTER 3 • SubSTiTuTES foR STRATEgy

KEy quESTionS
● How does total quality management fit into operations strategy?
● How do lean operations fit into operations strategy?
● How does business process reengineering fit into operations strategy?
● How does Six Sigma fit into operations strategy?
● What place do these new approaches have in operations strategy?

Fads, fashion and the ‘new’ approaches to operations
One of the defining characteristics of business over the last two or three decades has
been the number of ‘new approaches’ to the management of operations. Many of these
new approaches have captured popular management imagination, at least for a short
while. This is why many managers will say that their operations strategy is to imple-
ment ‘lean operations principles’, or ‘total quality management’, or ‘business process
reengineering’, or ‘enterprise resource planning’, or ‘Six Sigma’. What such responses
indicate is that the company has opted to use a pre-packaged approach to improve its
operations performance. And it is an increasingly common response. This is because
either (a) these approaches are an easily understood and relatively simply way to tackle
the complexities of modern operations, or (b) they seem to have worked in other organ-
isations, or (c) they sound as if they are new and by implication therefore must be bet-
ter than what went before, or (d) they have been sold the idea by a consultant (or read
about it in a book) and it’s worth trying something new because many other things
have failed to bring improvements. So, are these approaches really strategic? Or are they
simply a way of avoiding the difficult process of reconciling market requirements and
operations resource capabilities?
The answer is probably that they are a bit of both. Why one adopts a particular
approach and how it is implemented is at least as important as which approach is
adopted. Certainly some organisations have gained significant operations-based advan-
tages from adopting these approaches. None of the ideas is entirely without merit,
and there have been many well reported triumphs. Particularly in the popular busi-
ness press, these new approaches were hailed as almost a prerequisite to any kind of
competitive success. However, it is also evident that many organisations have failed to
derive much, if any, benefit from their adoption, and partly as a result there has come
a backlash. This is a natural phenomenon. No sooner is something set up as being the
answer to sorting out operations’ many problems, than someone wishes to knock it
down again. There is always mileage for journalists and academics in ‘smashing the
myth’, ‘exposing the truth’, and so on. Yet, amidst these predictable reactions, there
were several studies that called into serious question the universal applicability and
universal success of the new approaches. Although these studies do vary, many indi-
cate that (at the most) only around one-third of all initiatives involving these new
approaches are deemed successful.
One study examined the huge volume of management literature that deals with all
the various ‘new’ approaches and plotted how interest in them grows and (often) falls

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