In the current business environment, operations must be managed in a way that will enable the firm to compete against extensive and increasing competition from around the world. This means that managing operations takes on wholly different requirements to how it was performed in the past. In short, operations management becomes strategic operations management.
There is no one best way to formulate strategy and the debate on whether strategy should be internal, resource-based or fully externally market-driven may be seen as of intellectual interest only. In practice, many organizations will combine both internal and external considerations in the same way that they tend to innovate as a result of both push technology’ (from internal developments) and ‘pull demand’ (from market requirements). These capabilities are not limited to operations only but they must include operations capabilities, including quality, innovation, flexibility of volume and variety requirements, delivery speed and reliability. While excellent marketing skills need to be in place within an organization, they are of little use if there are not world-class operations management capabilities (internal and external)also in place to support the marketing intentions of the organization.
WHY DO WE NEED TO STUDY STRATEGIC OPERATION MANAGEMENT?
Operations and operations management are of strategic importance to an organization. This is because all of the aspirations that modern day organizations have to excel in any of the following – mass customization, lean production, agile manufacturing, customer-centric provision and so on depend on the ability of the organization to actually do these things and such cap-abilities reside within operations.
One of the key tasks for operations managers in developing strategy is that these managers are aware of competitive factors and as a result are able to put in place capabilities to deal with such competitive requirements.