Synthesis on Operational Strategy and Productivity

OPERATIONAL STRATEGY AND PRODUCTIVITY

Summary

Product and service design is a key factor in meeting or exceeding customer expectations. With constantly changing variables that include technological advancements and customer behaviors, there must be continuous improvement but even if each customer is unique, a degree of standardization in the operational design is important.

Successful design often incorporates many of these basic principles: Determine what customers want as a starting point; minimize the number of parts needed to manufacture an item or the number of steps to provide a service; simplify assembly or service, standardize as much as possible; and make the design robust. Trade-off decisions are common in design, and they involve such things as development time and cost, product or service cost, special features/performance, and product or service complexity.

Meaningful Principles

The important thing to remember in product and service design is that it should be customer-centric. It is not about what or how company would like to do it but whether it is what the customer would be delighted to pay for. Next is that designing should have continuous improvement because not only costs change but behavior of customers too. Therefore, the design should adaptive to the needs and wants to the customers. It should also be robust or multifunctional so training is very important because employees’ skills must also be continuously enhanced.

Application

Our department – Marketing – must be able to understand the customers’ behavior, needs and wants ideally. We should be able to provide this information to the management so that the operations can adjust to meet it. Ideally, we should conduct the market research and benchmarking to know the trends. We should be able to forecast what could be a fad so the operations can apply it in the product and service design.

Plan of Action

To be able to help in the achievement of a robust and delightful product and service demand, the Marketing Department must:

1. Collaborate with the operations or different department heads to make the processes easier for the customers.