Operations Strategy

Reporte de Lectura
¨Operations Strategy¨



29 de Agosto del 2012.

Operations Strategy
The fundamental purpose of an organization is to provide goods and services of value to customers, it is important to take into account customer needs and requirements and also to understand how customers evaluate goods and services. A company usually cannot satisfy all customers with the same goodsand services. Customers must be segmented into several natural groups, each with unique wants and needs. These segments might be based on buying behavior, geography, demographics, sales volume, profitability, or expected levels of service.
To correctly identify what customers expect requires begin “close to the customer.” There are several ways to do this. Good marketing research includes suchtechniques as focus groups, salesperson and employee feedback, customer surveys etc.

Dissatisfiers, Satisfiers, and Exciters/Delighters
Japanese professor Noriaki Kano suggested three classes of customer requirements:
1. Dissatisfiers: requirements that are expected in a good or service.
2. Satisfiers: requirements that customers say they want.
3. Exciters/Delighters: new or innovategood or service features that customers do not expect. The presence of unexpected features leads to surprise and excitement and enhances the customers’ perceptions of value.
As customers become familiar with new goods and service features that delight them, these same features become part of the standard customer benefit package over time. Ultimately, exciters become satisfiers. Basic customerexpectations, dissatisfiers and satisfiers are generally considered the minimum performance level required to stay in business and are often called order qualifiers. The unexpected features that surprise, entertain and delight customers by going beyond the expected often make the difference in closing a sale. Order winners are goods and service features and performance characteristics thatdifferentiate one customer benefit package from another and win the customers’ business.

Search, Experience, and Credence Attributes
Consumers want quality in the goods and services they purchase. The concept of quality can mean several different things, from a vague notion of “excellence” to the ability of a production process to conform to engineering specifications. One of the more populardefinitions is “fitness for intended use.” Research suggests that customers use three types of attributes in evaluating the quality of goods and services: search, experience and credence. Search attributes are those that a customer can determine prior to purchasing the goods and/or services. Experience attributes are those that can only be discerned after purchase or during consumption or use. Credenceattributes are any aspects of a good or service that the customer must believe in but cannot personally evaluate even after purchase and consumption.
Customers evaluate services in ways that are often different from the ways they evaluate goods:
* Customers seek and rely more on information from personal sources than from nonperosnal sources when evaluating services prior to purchase.
*Customers use a variety of perceptual features in evaluating services. The design and daily operations of service facilities must create a positive image and meet or exceed their expectations.
* Customers normally adopt innovations in services more slowly than they adopt innovations in goods.
* Customers perceive greater risks when buying services than when buying goods.
*Dissatisfaction with services is often the result of customers’ inability to properly perform or coproduce their part of the service.
With these insights we can now understand why it results more difficult to design services and service processes than goods and manufacturing operations.

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