Operations Management. Your Furniture Store is a 30-year-old furniture manufacturing company producing medium-density fiberboard (wood composite) dining room, living room, and bedroom furniture in high volume at low cost for wholesale customers. The organization has a competitive advantage by providing high volumes at low cost while maintaining a quality product backed by excellent service. In the last 2 years, the company has slipped from #1 in its market down to #2 due to increasing customer complaints about the availability of its products (resulting in back-orders) and frustrations with the customer service provided by the company’s call center. As a result, the company’s new chief executive officer (CEO) has directed the chief operating officer (COO) and her operations management team to do the following:
- Devise an operations management strategy to align with the company’s competitive advantage strategy, as well as utilize some, or all of the operations functions (e.g., marketing and sales, finance, and operations), to improve the customer’s experience relative to production and service.
Given the proposed operations management strategy, differentiate how the organization’s production operation and its service operation contribute to the company’s competitive advantage. Address the following.
- Introduce the reader to how organization and operation strategies align to drive competitive advantage. Introduce the reader to the operations functions (marketing and sales, finance, and operations) and how they collaborate to manage a business operation.
- Devise an operations strategy that aligns with the company’s current competitive advantage strategy.
- Examine how the proposed operations strategy enables the company to improve its competitive advantage, including explaining to the CEO how the strategy utilizes operations functions (marketing and sales, finance, and operations) to achieve competitive advantage.
- Given the proposed operations management strategy, differentiate for the CEO how the organization’s production operation and its service operation contribute to the company’s competitive advantage.
- The conclusion should summarize key points from the research methods and sampling analysis discussed above.
Deliverable Requirements: The Operations Strategy and Competitive Advantage Analysis should be 5 pages in length. Be sure to cite sources using APA properly; include references and in-text citations.
Submitting your assignment in APA format means, at a minimum, you will need the following:
- Title page: Remember the running head. The title should be in all capitals.
- Length: 5 pages minimum
- Body: This begins on the page following the title page and must be double-spaced (be careful not to triple- or quadruple-space between paragraphs). The typeface should be 12-pt. Times Roman or 12-pt. Courier in regular black type. Do not use color, bold type, or italics, except as required for APA-level headings and references. The deliverable length of the body of your paper for this assignment is 5 pages. In-body academic citations to support your decisions and analysis are required. A variety of academic sources is encouraged.
- Reference page: References that align with your in-body academic sources are listed on the final page of your paper. The references must be in APA format using appropriate spacing, hanging indent, italics, and uppercase and lowercase usage as appropriate for the type of resource used. Remember, the Reference page is not a bibliography, but a further listing of the abbreviated in-body citations used in the paper. Every referenced item must have a corresponding in-body citation. Use APA referencing style.