Operations and Supply Chain Management - Basics of Operations Strategy

This set of vocabulary flashcards covers the fundamental concepts of operations strategy, including product attributes, process competencies, and different types of process architectures as discussed in the lecture notes.

Product cost

The total cost of ownership to the customer, including purchase price, service, maintenance, repair, insurance, and disposal cost.

Product delivery time

The total time a customer must wait before receiving a product or service.

Product variety

The choices offered to the customer, including options, colors, styles, and the number of product lines and families.

Product Quality

The degree of excellence that determines how well a product works based on features, performance, reliability, serviceability, and aesthetics.

Customer Value Proposition

A set of benefits along the four product attributes (cost, time, quality, variety) that a firm offers to its customers.

Process Cost

The total cost of producing and delivering products and services.

Scope flexibility

A process competency representing the ability to produce and deliver a range of products and services using flexible resources like cross-trained workers.

Volume flexibility

A process competency representing the ability of the process to deal with fluctuating demand.

Process Quality

The ability of a process to deliver quality products.

Process flow time

The total time needed to transform a flow unit from input to output.

Process Architecture

The type of resources used to perform activities and their physical layout in the processing network.

Job Shop Architecture

A process architecture that uses flexible resources to produce low volumes of highly customized variety products.

Functional layout

A layout used in job shop architecture where similar resources are located together, such as press machines in a stamping department.

Flow Shop Architecture

A process architecture using specialized resources that perform limited tasks with high precision and speed, arranged according to a sequence of activities.

Product layout

A layout where resources are arranged according to the sequence of activities needed to produce a particular product, typical of flow shop architecture.

Operations Strategy

A specific plan of action to reach a particular objective, such as delivering superior performance relative to the competition through differentiation.

Efficient frontier

The smallest curve that contains all current industry positions, representing the trade-offs operations must make between attributes like flexibility and cost efficiency.