Topic
Supply Chain and Operations Management Report
Instructions
- Formulate and illustrate an operations strategy that will integrate with the resource requirements and marketing functions for Caterpillar.
- Critically assess managerial skills and competencies required for management of supply chain and operations in a rapidly changing commercial and technological environment for the company.
- Explain how to plan and manage an operations function and report on the optimum layout for specific types of process work flows and process technologies.
- Evaluate and make appropriate recommendations to the board in your plan methodologies that will assist with the management of change within operations management in order to improve quality and lean management of operations and also improve the overall competitiveness of the business, .
Answer Preview
Operations strategies exhibit a horizontal relationship with different functional strategies such as marketing (Flynn, Morita and Machuca, 2011). Integrating resource requirements with marketing functions is a strong operations strategy that addresses changes in marketing environment, particularly in the global perspective. There are several approaches that suggest how Caterpillar can execute this strategy.
First, operations strategies should be connected to marketing functions by taking into account how products and service wins a significant market share. Jose Zanon et al. (2013) believe that it is important to identify competitive criteria in the market: market wining criteria. As such, Caterpillar must identify the factors that must be met in the global market before customers can made decision of buying its products and services. Another criterion involves order winning. In this case, the customers depend on particular factors during their buying behaviour. For example, Caterpillar can use price as the order winning criteria. Other factors such as convenience, quality and class could serve as global market qualifying criteria. As such, operation strategy for Caterpillar should be developed in a manner that satisfies the market qualifying requirements, and strive to improve in the market segments in which the business wishes to excel.
Word Count: 3000