BUSINESS

Strategic Operations Management

Strategic Operations Management

Introduction

DeLonghi is one of the leading manufacturer and global brand of coffee, comfort, kitchen appliances and homecare products in Europe. The company is known for its product quality and reliability and a global market leader from the past 35 years. It has acquired the 5 manufacturing locations which make up around 52,000 square meters of production space. The company has achieved a turnover level in excess of 210 million Euros globally. DeLonghi has always strived to achieve maximum market share by implementing technological changes in its products and satisfying its customers through competitive advantage. The variety of products is offered to the consumers by taken into account the different cultural background, lifestyle, homecare routines and environments (DeLonghi, official website, 2012).

The strategy covers the full spectrum operations-making regarding the long-term capabilities of the operation of an organization, and its contribution to business strategy, reconciling market requirements with operations resources. Business strategy enables an organization to achieve and maintain superior performance in overcoming business challenges, understanding industry trends and linking concrete actions and a clear corporate vision (Johnson, et al., 2005, pp. 112). Whether for growth, innovate, improve efficiency and are more profitable, companies need strategies they can implement and use to get results. The report is based on identifying the relationship between operation and business strategy, issues related to layout, process type and use of technologies within the organization and value chain and quality assurance.

a) Links between Operations Strategy and Business Strategy

Operations and Strategy

Strategy of business organization guides the company on how to survive and sustained competitive advantage in competitive environment on long term. The decision and actions taken by organization is managed by operation department of the company which is responsible to enable an organization to achieve its sustainability over the long period of time. There are many ways through which an organization strives to achieve its strategy and overall corporate objectives by securing, deploying and utilizing firm's resources. It indicates how the company is assuring to obtain specific performance objectives.

According to Slack et al. (2004), there are five main operations performance objectives:

1 Cost: manufacturing goods at low cost.

2 Quality: accuracy of specification and quality assurance

3 Speed: do and manage things quickly in order to deliver the products and make it available on time to the customers (effective order delivery process)

4 Dependability: producing products on the basis of company's promise of providing good quality products to the customers.

5 Flexibility: the ability to bring change in the operations to enhance the effectives of the operation process (Slack, et al., 2004, pp. 120).

The above mentioned objectives can enable DeLonghi to ensure the productivity and performance of employees that must be matched with the set standard in order to follow proper organizational strategies and plans. The relationship of operations and strategy is shown in figure 1.

Figure 1: Source: http://cws.cengage.co.uk/barnes/students/sample_ch/ch2.p

Here, it can be observed that the success of any business strategy is dependent on the potential of the level of performance of operations in ...