4 Building Competitive Advantage Through Functional-Level Strategy.

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4

Building Competitive Advantage Through

Functional-Level Strategy

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Functional-Level Strategies

• Strategies aimed at improving the effectiveness of a company’s operations

• Improving a company’s ability to attain superior efficiency, quality, innovation, and customer responsiveness

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The Roots of Competitive Advantage

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Achieving Superior Efficiency

• Economies of scale– Unit cost reductions associated with a large scale

of output• Ability to spread fixed costs over a large production

volume• Ability of companies producing in large volumes to

achieve a greater division of labor and specialization

• Diseconomies of scale– Unit cost increases associated with a large scale of

output

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Economies and Diseconomies of Scale

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Achieving Superior Efficiency (cont’d)

• Learning effects– Cost savings that come from learning by doing

• Labor productivity

• Management efficiency

• When changes occur in a company’s production system, learning has to begin again

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The Impact of Learning and Scale Economies on Unit Costs

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Achieving Superior Efficiency (cont’d)

• The experience curve– The systematic lowering of the cost structure and

consequent unit cost reductions that occur over the life of a product

• Economies of scale and learning effects underlie the experience curve

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The Experience Curve

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Achieving Superior Efficiency (cont’d)

• Dangers of complacency with the experience curve– It will bottom out– New technologies can make experience effects

obsolete– Some technologies may not produce lower costs

with higher volumes of output– Flexible manufacturing technologies may allow

small manufacturers to product at low unit costs

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Unit Production Costs in an Integrated Mill and Mini-Mill

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Achieving Superior Efficiency (cont’d)

• Flexible manufacturing (lean production)– Technology that reduces setup times for complex

equipment, improves scheduling to increase use of individual machines, and improves quality control

– Increases efficiency and lowers unit costs– Mass customization reconciles two goals: low cost and differentiation through product customization

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Tradeoff Between Costs and Product Variety

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Achieving Superior Efficiency (cont’d)

• Marketing– Marketing strategy: pricing, promotion,

advertising, product design, distribution– Reducing customer defection rates and building

customer loyalty

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The Relationship Between Customer Loyalty and Profit per Customer

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Achieving Superior Efficiency (cont’d)

• Materials management– Getting inputs and components to a production

facility, through the production process, and out through a distribution system to the end user

– Just-in-time (JIT) inventory system– Supply chain management

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Achieving Superior Efficiency (cont’d)

• R&D strategy– Designing products that are easy to manufacture– Process innovations

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Achieving Superior Efficiency (cont’d)

• Human resource strategy: employee productivity– Hiring– Training– Self-Managing Teams– Pay for Performance

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Achieving Superior Efficiency (cont’d)

• Information systems and the Internet– Automating interactions between

• Company and customers

• Company and suppliers

• Infrastructure– Company structure, culture, style of strategic

leadership, and control system determine context of all value creation activities

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Primary Roles of Value Creation Functions in Achieving Superior Efficiency

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Achieving Superior Quality

• Attaining superior reliability– Total quality management (TQM)

• Improved quality means that costs decrease

• As a result, productivity improves

• Better quality leads to higher market share and allows increased prices

• This increases profitability

• More jobs are created

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Implementing Reliability Improvement Methodologies

• Build organizational commitment to quality• Focus on the customer• Find ways to measure quality• Set goals and create incentives• Solicit input from employees• Identify defects and trace them to source• Work with suppliers• Design for ease of manufacture• Break down barriers among functions

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Attributes Associated with a Product Offering

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Achieving Superior Quality (cont’d)

• Developing Superior Attributes– Learn which attributes are most important to

customers– Design products and associate services to embody

the important attributes– Decide which attributes to promote and how best

to position them in consumers’ minds– Monitor competition for improvement in attributes

and development of new attributes

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Achieving Superior Innovation

• Innovation can– Result in new products that better satisfy customer

needs– Improve the quality of existing products– Reduce costs

• Innovation can be imitated so it must be continuous

• Successful new product launches are major drivers of superior profitability

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The High Failure Rate of Innovation

• Uncertainty– Quantum innovation vs. incremental innovation

• Poor commercialization

• Poor positioning strategy

• Technological Myopia

• Slow to Market

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Achieving Superior Innovation (cont’d)

• Building Competencies in Innovation– Building skills in basic and applied research– Project selection and management

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The Development Funnel

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Achieving Superior Innovation (cont’d)

• Building Competencies in Innovation (cont’d)– Cross-functional integration– Product development teams– Partly parallel development processes

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Sequential and Partly Parallel Development Processes

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Function Roles for Achieving Superior Innovation

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Achieving Superior Responsiveness to Customers

• Customer focus– Leadership– Employee attitudes– Bringing customers into the company

• Satisfying customer needs– Customization– Response time

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The Primary Role of Different Functions in Achieving Superior Responsiveness to Customers