Operation Strategy in Organisations

1. There are three schools of thought in strategic thinking: rationalist, evolutionist and some combination of both. 

2. There are multiple dimensions to measure the performance of an operations system. Trade-offs exist among these dimensions. 

3. The emphasis on trade-offs or simultaneity can be explained by the relative position of a company within Porter's productivity frontier model. 

4. The product life cycle plays a significant role in determining operational competitive priorities. 

5. Various dimensions of operations performance have been categorised by Hill (1993) into order qualifying, order winning and order losing criteria. 

6. The rational school appears to favour the simultaneity approach and there are a number of approaches to the development of an operations strategy based on multiple competitive priorities including Hill, Platts, Gregory and Slack. 

7. There is an emerging approach to the development of operations strategy that suggests that it may be beneficial not to focus on the so called dimensions of operational performance such as cost, delivery time, quality etc dictated by the market, but to consider the adoption of a resource-based view of the firm where some resources are core while others are strategic competitive or peripheral. The most significant of these resources will be scarce and not easily replaced. 

8. The approach to developing an operations strategy appears to be more focused on manufacturing companies than service companies. There is an assumption that the approach is common to both manufacturing and service.