Resumen nahmias capitulo 1

Nahmias 1: Production and Operations Strategy
Every business needs to have some sort of strategy, a business strategy needs to have several key element that include the following, market of competition, level of investment, a place to run the business and a functional area strategy. A growing trend is for business to focus their attention on marketing and financial strategies instead ofproductions and operations strategy. A productions and operations strategy is defines as all of the decisions that are related to the production, storage, and distribution of goods and services. Some of the most common decisions are the locations of the facilities, the design of plants, the automaticity of certain processes and the overcall care for the employees.
The decisions that include theproduction and operations strategy are vital to the success of any company. A recent trend has bee to locate manufacturing facilities in other countries where labor is cheaper. Some problems of doing these, is that local politics could cause some problems, it takes more time to have a finished product and introducing new manufacturing technologies may be hard at first. One fact remains: Manufacturingstrategies are essential. One very popular trend in the United States is to dedicate a great amount of time to marketing and finance, but through the years, people have learned that manufacturing technologies are very important as well.
Some people believe that the economy is changing from industrial to a service economy, but viewing amount of imported manufactured goods in the U.S can prove theseotherwise.

The graph shows that the strongest imports are those that are manufactured, and these have increases compared to other past years. Since the global economy is moving forward, we can expect for imports to increase, but is a healthy economy is desired, exports should also increase at the same rate. Since the United States is importing more that it is exporting, it can be inferredthat most of the consumed goods come from abroad. Most of the clothing that people wear usually have on their tags a “made in Hong Kong” or “made in Taiwan” and we see as the most normal thing in the world, when all of these goods could be manufactures in our own country. The economic evolution has three steps or levels, first we have agriculture, and then we have industry and lastly service. It isclear and obvious that the economy has shifted from agriculture to industry, but this does not mean that agricultural production has declined. As for the change from industry to a service economy, this has not fully happened yet, even though many people this change ahs already occurred.
Innovation is a very important part of the industrial economy; this can be clearly seen in the Asian economy.Asia has been able to become the biggest and most important manufacturers for television sets, cameras, and basic household electronics. This happened because they managed to make manufacturing processes way more efficient and still make high quality products. Some of the brands people will recognize are Hitachi, Toshiba, Canon, Sony, etc.
Among many competitive factors, the most important onesare quality and time management. Quality control has been a very important part of any manufacturing process because a high quality product is “one that performs as it was designed to perform.” Using that definition of quality, it is possible for a product with poor design to be of high quality, just as it is possible for a well-designed product to be of poor quality. The way of measuring theproducts after manufacturing is by their reliability. The United States has a lot of competition for high quality products with Japan, an easy way to compare them, is in the auto companies. In 1980 it was reported that the Japanese could build a car for $1,500 less that the Americans, but Ford managed to narrow the gap to just a few hundred dollars. Another example was when the American machine tool...