Answer questions. Operations Management. Management Assignment.

Operations Management
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Question 1
The major objective of the cost leadership strategy is to become the lowest-cost producer in the entire industry. Traditionally, businesses achieve cost leadership via producing on a large scale, hence exploiting economies of scale. A better approach is increasing profits by reducing costs, while at the same time charging prices that are industry average. Further, businesses can charge lower prices, while maintaining a reasonable profit on each sale, due to the reduced costs. The concept of process design can be applied in minimizing costs, hence allowing a company to sell at industry-average prices (Kurt and Zehir, 2016). In this case, the business will design the products, services, and processes to ensure that they meet all the expectations in terms of performance and strategic business needs. Process design means the production of capacity to meet the demand. This eliminates any waste, hence reducing costs. A company applying the design process attains low processing, resource, and inventory costs, hence attaining cost leadership.
Differentiation
In a differentiation strategy, a company makes products or services that are more attractive compared to those of the competitors (Tanwar, 2013). One of the ways of doing this is through the production of high-quality products or services. Quality management is critical in making products attractive. Quality implies the extent to which an object or entity meets a set of attributes or requirements. As indicated in the quality management module, businesses have to remain aware of the costs of poor quality. For instance, it can increase warranty costs as clients return faulty products, wherein the process a business loses its reputation. Further, a company will incur more costs in the monitoring of the products and services through inspection and testing. Companies that emphasize high-quality products or services will be attractive in the market since clients want such products and services.
Focus
Businesses that utilize the focus strategy concentrate on certain niche markets. They do this by understanding the dynamics of the markets and the unique needs of the clients in it (Tanwar, 2013). As a result, they develop products and services that are specific to the market, while at the same time being well-specified. Chapter 3 highlights the essence of operations strategy in businesses. A business has to make a deliberate effort to make strategic decisions in operations that are suited to the market niche. In this regard, businesses should make both structural and infrastructural operations strategy decisions depending on the target market. For instance, typical structural and infrastructural decisions will entail identifying the products and services to be developed, the location of the sites, and how operations should be organized among others. A business will make strategic decisions in operations that suit the target market.
Question 2
Company A’s believe that “You don’t inspect quality into a product; you have to build it in” is a shift from inspection to prevention. This approach recognizes that the ability of a product or service to pass inspection does not guarantee quality (Hermans and Liu, 2013). A typical company inspects a certain percentage of the products, taken randomly from the output. Even when the sampled products indicated quality, there is a probability that a product may be faulty and still pass the inspection. In other words, it is not possible to inspect quality into products or services, since this is established at design. In this case, Company A endeavors to maintain quality by establishing it during the design and ensuring proper control of the manufacture of a particular product or service. A quality management system is put in place in three major ways. Firstly, the processes and responsibilities needed in achieving quality objectives are determined. The move is needed to ensure that all the processes work towards the attainment of the desired objectives. Secondly, methods are put in place to measure the efficiency of each process. Lastly, the means of preventing non-conformities are instituted. All the causes of non-conformities are established.
On the other hand, Company B believes that “Before you build quality into a product, you must inspect the quality” emphasizes more on inspection rather than prevention. The problem with this approach is that it does not improve or guarantee quality. In other words, inspection is already late, since good or bad quality is already embedded into the product (Hermans and Liu, 2013). Inspection of already produced products is useful when a business wants to gather data about the entire process. A company needs to inspect the process and get useful data to determine whether or not there is something out of control. The data produced demonstrates what needs to be investigated. The data obtained from the entire process is critical in evaluating success or failure, hence allowing a business to make all the necessary improvements. Otherwise, using this approach as a measure of quality is a disaster for a business. Inspecting to pull out items that have failed to meet the required quality standards is a path towards failure. A business that is using this method may not survive for long in a market that does not tolerate bad quality. When clients discover significant flaws in a product, they will move to other ones that are of high quality. This threatens the long term survival of the bu...