Operations Management: Chapter 2 Discussion and Review Questions

Chapter 2 Discussion and Review Questions

From time to time, various groups clamor for import restrictions or tariffs on foreign-produced goods, particularly automobiles. How might these be helpful? Harmful?

Help the country receiving tax monetarily; allows state to flourish internally; more costly for exporters

List the key ways that organizations compete.

Business organizations compete through some combination of their marketing and operations functions. Marketing influences competitiveness in several ways, including identifying consumer wants and needs, pricing, and advertising and promotion.

1. Identifying consumer wants and/or needs is a basic input in an organization’s decision-making process, and central to competitiveness. The ideal is to achieve a perfect match between those wants and needs and the organization’s goods and/or services.

2. Price and quality are key factors in consumer buying decisions. It is important to understand the trade-off decision consumers make between price and quality.

3. Advertising and promotion are ways organizations can inform potential customers about features of their products or services, and attract buyers.

Explain the importance of identifying and differentiating order qualifiers and order winners.

In formulating a successful strategy, organizations must take into account both order qualifiers and order winners. Order qualifiers are those characteristics that potential customers perceive as minimum standards of acceptability for a product to be considered for purchase. However, that may not be sufficient to get a potential customer to purchase from the organization. Order winners are those characteristics of an organization’s goods or services that cause them to be perceived as better than the competition.

Characteristics such as price, delivery reliability, delivery speed, and quality can be order qualifiers or order winners. Thus, quality may be an order winner in some situations, but in others...