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116 CHAPTER 3 • SubSTiTuTES foR STRATEgy
make the adoption of seemingly successful practices inappropriate. But, even if one
accepts ‘best practice’ as distilled into the new approaches that we have reviewed, there
are some important points to consider.

Senior managers sometimes use these new approaches without fully understand-
ing them
In this chapter, we have chosen to explain very briefly six of the approaches sometimes
referred to as ‘operations strategies’. One could easily have extended this list of four to
include several others, such as total preventive maintenance (TPM), lean Sigma (a com-
bination of lean and Six Sigma) and so on. But these four, in our view, constitute a repre-
sentative sample of the most commonly used approaches. Nor do we have the space to
describe them fully. Each of the approaches is the subject of several books that describe
them in great detail. There is no shortage of advice from consultants and academics
as to how they should be used. Yet it is not difficult to find examples of where senior
management have embarked on a programme of using one or more of these approaches
without fully understanding them. And if senior management do not understand these
approaches, how can the rest of the organisation take them seriously? The details of
Six Sigma or lean, for example, are not simply technical matters; they are fundamental
to how appropriate the approach could be in different contexts. Not every approach
fits every set of circumstances. So, understanding in detail what each approach means
must be the first step in deciding whether it is appropriate.

All these approaches are different
There are clearly some common elements between some of these approaches. The most
obvious element, for example, is the idea of a ‘customer-centric’ perspective. Further-
more, as these approaches develop over time, they may acquire elements from elsewhere.
Look how Six Sigma has developed beyond its process control roots to encompass many
other elements. Yet there are also differences between them, and these differences need to
be understood. For example, one important difference relates to whether the approaches
emphasise a gradual, continuous approach to change, or whether they recommend a more
radical ‘breakthrough’ change. Another difference concerns the aim of the approach.
What is the balance between whether the approach emphasises what changes should
be made or how changes should be made? Some approaches have a firm view of what is
the best way to organise the operation’s processes and resources. Other approaches hold
no particular view on what an operation should do but rather concentrate on how the
management of an operation should decide what to do. Put in operations strategy terms,
this distinction is similar to that between the content and process of operations strategy.
Figure 3.10 places each of the six approaches on these two dimensions.
Just as different authors have differing views as to the exact nature of some of these
approaches, one could position them on the two dimensions shown in Figure 3.10 in
slightly different ways. Nevertheless, there are some important differences between the
approaches that should be recognised. First, they differ in the extent that they prescribe
appropriate operations practice. BPR, for example, is relatively clear in what it is recom-
mending. It has a definite list of things that operations resources should or should not
be – processes should be end-to-end, non-value-added work should be eliminated, inven-
tory should be reduced, technology should be flexible and so on. Contrast this with both
Six Sigma and TQM, which focus to a far greater extent on how operations should be
improved. Six Sigma, in particular, has relatively little to say about what is good or bad in

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