■Pattern or plan that integrates an organization’s major goals,

policies, and action sequences into a cohesive whole

■Approach that seeks to develop capabilities required for
achieving it’s competitive advantage.
■Effective strategies develop around a few key competitive
priorities such as low cost or fast service time, which provide a
focus for the entire organization and exploit the organization’s
core competencies.
Core competencies

■Strengths that are unique to the company

■Typically to a company's set of skills or experience in some
activity, rather than physical or financial assets.
■Examples: particularly skilled or creative workforce, CRM, etc.
■Process of determining long-term goals, policies and plans for
the organization
■objective – build a robust position in selected ways to achieve
goals despite unforeseeable external forces arising
Levels of strategy

■Corporate
■Business
■Functional
■highest level of strategy
■sets the long-term direction and scope for the whole
organization
■Choose which SBUs the corporation will participate
Strategic
Business units
■Businesses in which the firm will participate
■Families of goods or services having similar characteristics or
methods of creation
■primarily concerned with how a particular business unit should
compete within its industry, and what its strategic aims and
objectives should be
■Defines the focus for SBUs
■individual function (operations, marketing, finance, etc.)
■concerned with how each function contributes to the business
strategy, what their strategic objectives should be and how they
should manage their resources in pursuit of those objectives.
Strategy level Key Issues
• What businesses shall we be in?
Corporate •
•
What businesses shall we acquire or divest?
How do we allocate resources between businesses?
• What is the relationship between businesses?
• What is the relationship between the center and the businesses?
• How do we compete in this business?
Business •
•
What is the mission of this business?
What are the strategic objectives of this business?

• How does the function contribute to the business strategy?

Function •
•
What are the strategic objectives of the function?
How are resources managed in the function?
• What technology do we use in the function?
• What skills are required by workers in the function?
OPERATIONS STRATEGY
■Defines how an organization will execute its chosen business
strategies
■Involves translating competitive priorities into operational
capabilities by making a variety of choices and trade-off for
design and operating decisions
For example: if the corporate objectives are to be the low cost and
market producer of a good, then adopting an assembly type of
process is how operations can help achieve this corporate objective.
Criteria for evaluating an operations strategy
Consistency
(Is the strategy consistent . . .?)
Contribution to competitive advantage
(Does the strategy . . . ?)
• Between the operations strategy and business strategy
• Between operations strategy and the other functional strategies
• Between the different decision areas of operations strategy
• Enable operations to set priorities that enhance competitive
advantage
• Highlight opportunities for operations to complement the
business strategy
• Make operations strategy clear to the rest of the organization
• Provide the operating capabilities that will be required in the
future