Operations Strategies 101-201: Definitions,

Process, Plans, Pro Insights

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Operations strategies drive a company’s operations, the part of the business that produces and
distributes goods and services. Operations strategy underlies overall business strategy, and both
are critical for a company to compete in an ever-changing market. With an effective ops strategy,
operations management professionals can optimize the use of resources, people, processes, and
technology.

In the book Operations Strategy, authors Nigel Slack and Michael Lewis define the term.
“Operations strategy is the total pattern of decisions which shape the long-term capabilities of
any type of operations and their contribution to the overall strategy,” they write.

Technology and business models are rapidly changing, so businesses must keep pace and look to
the future. 

“Those who get stuck on their own paradigms…perish,” says Tim Lewko, CEO and Managing
Partner of Thinking Dimensions Global.

This article will provide an overview of operations strategy including purpose, examples, types,
process, and how to write a plan. You’ll also hear in-depth insights from seven professionals,
including a look at what the future may bring.

 What Are the Operations of a Company?

 The Role and Purpose of Operations Strategy
 Core Operational Strategy Areas
 Tips for Operations Strategies and Tactics
 Operations Strategy Tips from Our Experts
 Operations Strategy Examples
 Types of Operations Strategies
 Operations Strategy Framework
 Steps to Write a Strategic Operations Plan
 Pro Tips on Writing a Strategic Operations Plan
 What Services Do Operations Strategy Consultants Offer?
 Operations Strategy FAQ
 The Future of Operations Strategy
 More Resources for Operations Strategies
 Effectively Manage Operations with Smartsheet

What Are the Operations of a Company?

A company’s operations are the activities that produce and deliver a product or service.
Operations management is the profession that encompasses planning, implementing, and
supervising that production. Some people think of operations as the daily tasks and tactics that
transform materials or actions into a product or service, but operations strategy goes a level
higher to determine operations approaches and goals.

In a car company, for example, operations could include the following: obtaining and
transporting raw materials (metal, rubber, and plastic, etc.), dealing with suppliers, conducting
and measuring the steps that transform materials into parts, managing the people, machines, and
processes, assembling the vehicles efficiently, maintaining quality and troubleshooting problems,
delivering car orders on time, and managing and continually optimizing the whole value chain.
In addition, operations could play a role in product design, plant capabilities and design, and
production or sales forecasting.

The seven main functions of operations are:

 Product management
 Supply chain
 Inventory
 Forecasting
 Scheduling
 Quality
 Facilities planning and management

Some people still understand operations as an organization’s daily operations and tactics, while
others see operations strategy as having a key role to play in companies of any size.

The Role and Purpose of Operations Strategy

Operations strategy is only one part of overall business or corporate strategy, but it’s crucial for
competitiveness and success. Without a strong operations strategy, companies fail to keep up
with changing markets and lose out to more strategic competitors. Many companies, big and
small, have struggled with operations strategy, often lacking in comparison with technologically
savvy competitors. For example, Amazon, while constantly advancing technology such as drones
for delivery, has pushed aside myriad brick-and-mortar retailers.

To be effective and competitive, all parts of a company must work together. All departments
should contribute to the company mission and have strategies underlying the overall
corporate/business strategy. In addition to having an operations strategy, they should also have
functional area strategies in finance, IT, sales, marketing, human resources, and possibly other
departments, depending on the type of business.
“An operations strategy should guide the structural decisions and the evolution of operational
capabilities needed to achieve the desired competitive position of the company as a whole,” says
Tim Laseter in his article "An Essential Step for Corporate Strategy.”

These days, however, it’s not enough to simply follow best practices. Companies must innovate,
not just play catch-up to practices already mastered by competitors.

Authors Steven C. Wheelwright and Robert H. Hayes categorized types of organizations based
on a company’s attitude toward operations:

 Stage 1, Internally Neutral: The operations function is reactive and viewed as a

necessary evil.
 Stage 2, Externally Neutral: The operations function adopts best practices and tries to
match the competition.
 Stage 3, Internally Supportive: The operations function tries to provide support for the
overall business strategy.
 Stage 4, Externally Supportive: The operations function provides competitive
advantage for the company, and sets the industry standard.

Core Operational Strategy Areas

Different sources use different terms to describe strategy areas. Here’s one way to categorize
core strategies:

 Corporate: Overall company strategy, driving the company mission and interconnected
departments
 Customer-Driven: Operational strategies to meet the needs of a targeted customer
segment
 Core Competencies: Strategies to develop the company’s key strengths and resources
 Competitive Priorities: Strategies that differentiate the company in the market to better
provide a desired product or service
 Product or Service Development: Strategies in product design, value, and innovation

A company’s key success factors (KSFs) pertain to competitiveness, such as a company’s

attributes, resources, capabilities, and competencies. By identifying these, a company can focus
on the issues that matter most and measure them with key performance indicators (KPIs).

Another way to frame strategic areas is by these “distinctive” competencies:

 Price
 Quality, such as performance, features, aesthetics, and durability
 Service
 Flexibility
  Tradeoffs, or competing on one or two distinctive competencies at the necessary expense
of others

Author Terry Hill used the terms order qualifier and order winner. An order qualifier means a
company or product has a characteristic that allows it to be a viable competitor. An order winner
is a characteristic that causes customers to choose it over competitors.

Tips for Operations Strategies and Tactics

Specific strategies depend on your specific business. Here are strategy tips that apply to many
companies, whether they are producing goods or services.

 Take a Global View: See how others worldwide are providing better goods and services.
Learn from them, and see how you might compete and innovate in a core competency.
Also, improve your supply chain by looking globally, and employ global talent if remote
work is an option.
 Have a Strong Mission Statement: Focus your efforts with a mission statement that
truly defines your goals and guides your business approach. Tie your overall business
strategy and operations strategy into it.
 Gain Competitive Advantage with Differentiation: Develop a point of differentiation
and a unique value proposition, and consistently innovate and build strategies around
them. Don’t just use best practices. Exceed them, and leapfrog the competition. 
 Gain Insights from a SWOT Analysis: Analyze your company’s strengths, weaknesses,
opportunities, and threats as a catalyst to strategy.
 Track Progress: Develop strong analytics and KPI dashboards to measure and optimize
your operational efforts.

Operations Strategy Tips from Our Experts

Now, our seven pros weigh in with their tips for creating and implementing effective operations
strategies. Robin Speculand and Tim Lewko were interviewed by phone, and the five others
submitted responses in writing.

 
Robin Speculand is the author of Excellence in Execution: How to Implement Your Strategy.
Speculand is the Founder and CEO of Bridges Business Consultancy and Creator of the
Implementation Hub, a portal dedicated to strategy implementation and featuring more than 500
resources. 

Paraphrased from a phone interview, Robin Speculand advises using the Triple A model of
alignment, accountability, and assessment. 

1. Alignment: Keep the team focused on balancing long-term and short-term perspectives. Many
people trip up on this. To be aligned, you can’t just drive your individual silo. Don’t assume all
plans are in alignment. You need consistent direction. 
2. Accountability: Introduce a culture of holding people accountable. Make sure people know
what’s important, and hold to your operational strategy. It’s one of the easiest areas to make a
massive impact in. In such a culture, your boss checks in every week to see how you’re doing.
It’s also important to link accountability to rewards and recognition. 
3. Assessment: You have to be able to assess how you’re doing at any point in time. You need to
measure with numbers.

 
Tim Lewko is the author of Making Decisions Better: How to Set and Simplify Business Strategy.
Lewko is CEO and Managing Partner of Thinking Dimensions Global (TDG), a global
management consultancy. He is also TDG's Managing Director of the Global Strategy Practice. 

Paraphrased from a phone interview, Tim Lewko offers these tips: 

1. Define what an operations strategy means in your organization. Create a common definition
because different definitions can cause communication breakdowns. 
2. Operations should follow from the company strategy. Business strategy is the “what,” and
operations is the “how.” 
3. An operations strategy is an investment in current and future capabilities underpinned by
visible assumptions. For example, if an auto company considers building a plant in Mexico, it’s
making assumptions about labor, capital, and trading. What does the team see as the future for
the business? It’s important to state the assumptions. When FedEx built a runway in China, some
people questioned the move. But FedEx saw a future market there.

Susan Ho is the Co-Founder and CEO of Journy, which pairs clients with a concierge to plan
trips. Previously, she was VP of Operations Strategy and Customer Service at Fab.com and
consulted on operations strategy for DigitalOcean, Blue Apron, and LearnVest. She started her
career as a BCG consultant, advising companies on strategy and operations. 

Susan Ho says, “Figure out what you want to accomplish and how you’re going to measure
success. When I first joined Fab.com, one of our biggest issues was communicating to customers
about late deliveries — when, for whatever reason, a supplier would be late in shipping a
purchase order to our warehouse, or our warehouse would take longer than expected to ship
product out to customers. When shipments were late, customer complaints would pile in. We
decided that we’d track the number of late shipping complaints as a percentage of total orders
and use that as our barometer for success.” 

She continues, “Get all the teams that touch a process into a room together. (Major caution on
this one.) This idea is actually much more complicated than it seems. If you just take this step
alone, you’ll most likely have a horribly unproductive meeting where everyone is more angry at
another team than before they walked into that room. As an operations strategist, my first step is
to talk to key people on each team separately - not a VP or director-level necessarily, but a few
people who are actually responsible for the day-to-day work. I have them walk me through their
process end-to-end, and, then, I map it out and review it with them. Then, we can point out areas
on the process map where a handoff between teams is breaking down, or there’s an SLA (service
level agreement) that we haven’t clearly defined that’s leading to confusion about what to do.
Once I do this with every team, I come up with a master list of issues and proposed solutions,
along with the pros and cons of those solutions. Only then do I get the senior decision makers in
a room together, so we can walk through each point and make a decision on questions like,
‘What team should ultimately own this?’ and ‘Should the cut-off point be two days or one day?’”

Merrick Levy is Chief Operations Officer for Shofur, a startup transportation company in
Atlanta.

“Properly aligned employee incentives are a key factor for long-term operational success,” says
Levy. “What many companies have found is that granting stock as a form of compensation has
strong positive effects. When you lease a car, you treat that car much differently than one you
own. You probably don't clean the car as often, make hard starts and stops, etc. When you own a
car, you are much more careful to treat it well, so it stays in good condition over the long term.
When employees own stock in a company, they make decisions that are better for the long
term.” 

Levy adds, “An organization must assign accountability to only one person for key functions.
More than one thing will fall through the cracks. An example in our businesses is ensuring we
assign each reservation to the appropriate bus company. We have centralized accountability for
every trip with our operations manager. He can delegate the work but is the only one
accountable. Finally, When errors occur, ask “Why?” five times to determine the true cause of
the error. Toyota has a great system of doing just that to get to the root of any error. We have
found that this works great in our business as well. This way, you can easily get to the true cause
of any operational failure and create a system to prevent it next time.”

Suresh Dalai has been implementing operations strategies for more than 20 years in Asia and the
U.S., with consultancies such as Alvarez & Marsal and Kurt Salmon and global brands such as
Levi Strauss and Ermenegildo Zegna. His views expressed in this article are his own and do not
necessarily reflect the views of these companies.

Suresh Dalai offers the following points:

 
“1. Make it consumer-driven. Whatever operations strategies you develop, ask whether they help
drive superior experience for the consumer — for example, accelerating production so that the
consumer can get it faster, improving quality, etc. 
2. Make it end-to-end. Many people may think of operations as a back-office activity, such as
production or logistics. However, an operations strategy focuses on the entire value chain, from
plan to make to move and then ultimately, to sell. Ensure that your operations strategy covers all
four areas. 
3. Make it well-understood by your team. Educate your organization so that everyone
understands that operations strategy is always about the consumer.” 

 
Cristian Rennella is CEO and Co-Founder of elMejorTrato.com, a price comparison website for
South America. 

Cristian Rennella recommends the following: 

“1. I recommend not trying what first comes to your mind. Before putting something into
practice, check that you have all the resources, adequate personnel, and enough time. In some
cases, assuming in advance that an idea is going to work can be as expensive as an unsuccessful
test. 
2. Have a sole responsible person. It is important that tasks are well organized, and, for this
reason, more than one person in one single activity can be problematic. For example, at
elMejorTrato, I am the one in charge of link building, and I take for granted that any related
activity depends on me. 
3. Have an adjustable working guide. Although it is useful to have a guideline, we always have
to be prompt in adapting it to new situations. The market is an environment affected by
continuous change, and it is essential to follow the herd (customers), modify rules, and make
contributions.” 

Miguel Fajardo is Operations Manager at ShipMonk, a third-party logistics (3PL) fulfillment

company.

“First, you have to know your team,” says Fajardo. “Understand their strengths and weaknesses.
You need to make sure that you are playing to their strengths. Otherwise, they'll never be able to
implement your strategy. Second, know the process. Anybody can determine a bottleneck when
they see it, for instance, but do you know the process well enough to know why it happened?
Third, you can't assume you know everything. Don't be afraid to read articles on how your
competitors tackle operations problems.” 
Operations Strategy Examples

With the rapidly changing marketplace in recent years, some companies have excelled in part
due to their strong operations strategies. Here a few examples:

 Amazon: Once known for books, Amazon is now known as the go-to platform for online
shoppers of any product. Its distribution network is widely touted and even includes
experiments with drone delivery.
 Apple Computers: Apple is long recognized in operations circles for its operational
excellence and supply chain management.
 Walmart: This retailing giant managed to undercut many competitors on the price and
variety of a wide range of products. 
 FedEx: FedEx made speed of delivery its calling card, achieving it with excellent
operations.
 IKEA: The world’s largest furniture retailer undercut many home goods competitors on
price and variety with its warehouse concept.

Types of Operations Strategies

We can broadly categorize major operations decisions as structure or infrastructure. Structure

means the physical attributes of operations, while infrastructure refers to the people, systems, and
software.

Structural decisions include facilities, capacity to produce, process technology, and supply
network. An example of a decision many companies face is how much to outsource vs. handle
in-house. The structural decision on whether to build or expand a facility is an expensive one that
could affect the company for years to come.

Infrastructure decisions include planning and control systems, quality management, work
organization, human resources, new product development, and performance management of
employees.

Operations strategy has a vertical relationship with overall business/corporate strategy, and it has
a horizontal relationship with other functional strategies, such as strategies for marketing, sales,
finance, IT, and HR. 

Another way to categorize operations strategies is top-down or bottom-up. That is, operations
strategies might come down from business strategy, supporting it. Or, strategies might arise over
time as a pattern of decisions within operations.

Also, operations strategy can be market-led or operations-led. When it’s market-led, operations
strategy derives from a response to the market conditions. When it’s operations-led, excellence
in operations in a particularly savvy company drives the strategy.
Operations Strategy Framework

Operations strategy provides the ability to improve products, services, and processes. To develop
the strategy, consider the business/corporate strategy and a market/needs analysis. Then, consider
the competing priorities of cost, quality, time, and flexibility — and how you’ll handle them.

To exist in the market, you need to have acceptable quality, price, reputation/years in business,
and reliability. To actually win more orders in the market, the factors change a bit. You need
winning quality, price, speed of delivery, consistency of delivery, and reliability.

These factors combine like this to provide an operations strategy framework, as outlined by lean
transformation consultant Anand Subramanian:

 We start with the business/corporate strategy, laying out objectives, such as return on
investment (ROI), profit, and growth.
 We move to marketing strategy, where we consider factors such as customer segments,
standardization vs. customization, innovation level, and leader-vs.-follower alternatives.
 Next comes order-winning criteria such as quality, price, delivery speed, design, and
after-sales support.
 Last comes operations/manufacturing strategy, which includes choices of structure (such
as facilities and process) and infrastructure (such as planning/control systems and work
organization). Feeding into that strategy are the elements of product/process design,
inventory, quality management, human resources and job design, and maintenance.

In a similar vein, Slack and his co-authors outlined five performance objectives in their 2004
book, Operations Management: 

 Cost: Ability to compete on low price

 Quality: Ability to compete on high quality
 Speed: Ability to compete on fast delivery
 Dependability: Ability to compete on reliable delivery
 Flexibility: Ability to compete with new products or services, wide selection, and timing

Authors Henry Mintzberg and James A. Waters wrote about how organizations form strategies in
their 1985 book, Of Strategies, Deliberate and Emergent. Organizations start with an intended
strategy, but only some of that is realized through deliberate strategy. Some intentions are left
unrealized, such as those that didn’t adequately consider operational feasibility. Meanwhile,
emergent strategies develop as patterns of actions taken in the organization — most often by the
operations department. The deliberate strategies and emergent strategies feed into the realized
strategies. This process shows the importance of operations details in the big picture.

Steps to Write a Strategic Operations Plan

Below are 15 straightforward steps for writing a solid strategic operations plan:

1. Choose the Right People: Select those with the right knowledge to compile the
operations strategy plan, sometimes just called an operations plan. Some businesses
provide more strategy than others in their ops strategy plan.
2. Study the Overall Business Strategy Plan: Sometimes the operations strategy plan is
included as a section of the overall business plan. In any case, the ops strategy plan
should align with the business plan.
3. Develop Measurable Operations Goals: These should match up with the business plan.
Don’t do KPIs in a vacuum. Ensure that stakeholders have a say and agree to the
numbers. 
4. Gather Key People to Brainstorm Strategies: Work on strategies (approaches to reach
goals) and underlying tactics (specific steps and tasks to implement the strategy). 
5. Outline Your Major Points to Maintain Your Plan’s Focus: Use headings,
subheadings, and bulleted lists for clear organization. These will carry over to your fully
written plan, providing clear structure and easy scanning. Your plan might have elements
of a SWOT analysis: strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
6. Keep Your Audience in Mind: Write so that they will understand it. The plan is all
about communication.
7. Include an Index: Use this for easy scanning of the plan and its sections.
8. Use an Appendix: Use this for supplementary material or for items too detailed for the
whole audience.
9. Include the Operations Budget: Include it, or cross-reference or cross-link it in your
operations strategy plan. Show the rationale for key budget items, especially large
expenses.
10. Include a “Stage of Development” Section: Give an overview of the current state of
operations and what you’re trying to accomplish and improve. Provide a high-level view
of how you make your product, your supply chain, and quality control. Identify risks and
how you’ll monitor them.
11. Include a Production Process Section: This goes into detail on the daily production
process, and demonstrates that you’ve worked out the necessary specifics. For
manufacturing, you would list plant details, equipment, assets, materials, special
requirements, inventory, and quality control steps. For a startup, you might include
prototype and testing details.
12. If Necessary, Divide Other Sections by Product Family: You can also divide them by
product, service, or different areas of operations. You might include overall strategies and
tactics and/or consider them by section.
13. Use Flowcharts: Use these images and other graphics to make it more easily
understandable.
14. Build in Flexibility: Explain how you might adjust operations based on a changing
market.
15. Regularly Monitor Your Goals: Do this to see how your strategies and tactics are
working. Adjust as necessary to keep ahead of the curve. A strong operations strategy
plan is key to your success.
Pro Tips on Writing a Strategic Operations Plan

Tim Lewko (paraphrased from a phone interview) suggests that you do the following: 

1. Write the plan based on priority products. All products aren’t the same. For example, if you’re
thinking of expanding into Canada, consider what percentage of primary products are
represented there. 
2. Know your current and future priority customers. Different departments such as operations,
marketing, and sales may not agree on priorities. 
3. Use a matrix of priority products and priority customers to clarify opportunities and decisions. 
4. Decide whether to buy or build. Is it something you should outsource? You don’t need to
know everything. You just need to know where to get it. 

Robin Speculand (paraphrased from a phone interview) provides these tips: 

1. Don’t wait for perfection. There’s no such thing. As soon as you roll out your operations plan,
things change. Once you get 80 percent of your plan, start to roll it out. 
2. Be clear on what’s actionable. You need to be able to explain what action is taking place
across the division. 
3. Make sure you have clear measures in place. Every objective must have a measure. 

Susan Ho says, “Don’t do it alone — communication and getting buy-in is everything. The
biggest point of frustration I see from teams is when executives put forth operations plans and
goals without consulting them. At best, it leads to unrealistic goals. At worst, it leads to a
disillusioned team that’s not bought in. Before putting something down on paper and handing it
to teams as gospel, schedule time with directors and managers to communicate the business-level
goals, why they’re important, and why they need to happen. Talk to them about the operational
implications of those business goals. What will be easy for them to achieve, what will be
difficult, and why? What do they need to make it happen?” 

She continues, “Spend extra time mapping out interdependencies and worst-case scenarios. At
Journy, we pair travelers one on one with an expert concierge who custom builds a detailed
travel itinerary based on the customer’s interests. At the highest level, we have monthly revenue
goals that we want to achieve. Because we have a labor and time-intensive product, we need to
carefully coordinate three key variables: top-line growth based on marketing and sales initiatives;
capacity (how many hours our concierge team has available), which is directly impacted by how
fast we execute against our engineering roadmap; and hiring and training new concierges. At the
same time, we also have SLAs to deliver all itineraries to travelers within 5-7 days of their
request. Because of that, we have clear processes for how our marketing team communicates
with our operations team and for how operational plans align with our marketing tests. For
example, if the marketing team hits it out of the park, what is the implication for ops?”

“Connect the dots in your value chain,” Suresh Dalai suggests. “To make the plan end-to-end,
start with the consumer and work backward (sell, move, make, plan). If sell is your consumer,
working backward, you need to plan, make, and move. Your operations strategy should articulate
how these steps are connected in your business and how each piece in the chain supports the next
piece. Next, measure the effectiveness of your operations plan through consumer-facing KPIs.
The KPIs should be as close to consumer experience as possible. For example, many operations
KPIs are about meeting operational efficiency goals (e.g., reducing lead times from order to
delivery, increasing fill rates [the percentage of the request filled at a certain time], or simply
increasing the number of widgets produced per labor). However, a consumer-facing KPI would
be, for example, the percentage of consumers satisfied with your product availability or with the
high quality/durability of your products.”

“Operations plans are really focused on the middle section of the P&L (the costs), so minimize
them,” says Levy. “While operations does focus on creating a system to scale an organization,
keeping costs low and maximizing profit is something I look at carefully. Operations plans
should ask tough questions like, ‘Is hiring this team necessary, or can we solve this with
technology?’ or ‘Should we perform more experiments to test the viability of new businesses
before investing heavily?’ These are questions that should be at the core of an operations plan for
any evolving organization. You should also have all leaders present, and get in the weeds. As an
executive, you have to get in the weeds when you are designing a strategic operating plan.
Executives should constantly meet with people on every level of the organizational structure to
test assumptions.” 

Levy adds, “Keep one eye on the short term and one on the long term. Short and long-term
planning are equally important and not always easy to balance. Some plans may have the desired
effect now, but could cause issues down the line. This often comes into play with the
organizational chart and how different groups work together. You want to ensure that everyone
is aligning their decision making - not only with their individual department, but also with the
overall goals of the company. This is crucial for long-term operational success.” 

Cristian Rennella notes, “When writing a strategic operation plan, I suggest not writing it in full.
It is advisable to write just the initial points. Then, make contributions so as to complete it
according to the market needs. Another interesting point is about flexibility. Always be open to
new modifications, not just at the moment of writing, but also once you’ve implemented the
plan.” 

“First, be sure you have a contingency built in,” Fajardo emphasizes. “Manufacturers and
distributors are likely to miss deadlines too, so build yourself leeway of plus or minus 48 hours
on either side whenever possible. Second, sit down and consult with your department heads as
you write the plan. What sounds feasible to your line manager might have major negative
consequences for your receiving manager. Everybody needs to be on the same page. Third, if
opportunity and operations flow permits it, test out small phases of your plan in a controlled
fashion, so you can see if the pacing and flow match your desired expectations,” he concludes.

What Services Do Operations Strategy Consultants Offer?

Consultants offer a wide range of services in functional strategy areas like operations as well as
overall corporate/business strategy. Among other things, they can help a business do the
following:

 Map and assess their operations

 Improve alignment with the overall business and with other departments
 Create strategic plans
 Perform a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats)
 Advise on better technology
 Develop benchmarking, KPIs, and goals
 Streamline operations for efficiency and cost reduction
 Implement strategic plans and new ways of doing things

Operations Strategy FAQ

What is operational effectiveness vs. strategy?

Operational effectiveness is about continually improving functional performance to better use

resources and improve processes. Strategy is more about creating a unique value proposition to
surpass competitors and succeed in the market.

What is meant by operational sustainability? 

Operational sustainability is the business’ ability to maintain existing practices without placing
future resources at risk. It often refers to ecological resources.

What is a competitive capability?

This means a plant's performance compared with competitors. Performance capabilities include
quality, delivery, flexibility, and cost.

The Future of Operations Strategy

Lewko (paraphrased from a phone interview) provides these thoughts on the future of operations
strategy: 
1. You don’t know who the future competition is, so you have to start looking now. Who could
be a future competitor? Consider who has better distribution and better manufacturing. 
2. What technologies can you leverage in your business that you haven’t already? How can you
lower costs and/or better serve customers? Find a better way, a better price, better technology.
You could have produced the best buggy whip in the world but still been beaten out by the
automobile. 
3. Use an outside-in perspective. Don’t just keep looking through the lens of what you’ve always
done.

Ho points out that “Everyone has been talking about AI — from using it to streamline meeting
scheduling (Clara.ai and x.ai) to making recommendations to managers about their teams
(butterfly.ai) to using machine learning to solve complex problems. It’s certainly true that there
are many implications for AI in operations strategies that can make the job easier. I would argue,
however, that when it comes to operational strategy, getting the ‘right’ answer is just a small part
of the job. It’s mobilizing the broader organization to effectively do something about that answer
that is the greater challenge, and a machine just won’t be able to do that.” 

“The evolving trend in operations strategy is the integration of technology into every aspect of
your business,” says Levy. “Operations executives must have a strong understanding of
technological trends and push the envelope for integrating technology. The first question I ask
myself when making a hiring decision is whether or not I can address this problem with
technology. Technology and automation remove the possibility of human error, ultimately
making for better processes across your organization” he emphasizes.

Speculand (paraphrased from a phone interview) believes that matching the pace of change is
critical to future market survival: You have to be more fluid and agile than ever before.
Operations strategies need to keep up with the pace of change. The digital transformation affects
everyone to some degree, and operational models around the world are changing. Every
operation is going to be challenged.

Dalai sees vertical integration, technology, and the right management talent as the keys to the
future of operations strategy: “Vertical integration: Each player in the operational value chain
will increasingly try to do what its customers or suppliers do in an attempt to control their own
destiny and profit by eliminating the middleman. For example, the sellers of clothes will
increasingly try to source materials and manufacture these clothes on their own instead of
outsourcing the materials and production. The producers of clothes will increasingly try to sell
them directly to consumers instead of supplying to the sellers (brands). However, the challenge
in these moves is that companies are stepping out of their core competency. Some will succeed.
Most will fail. Those who can harness technology well and have skilled managers will succeed in
venturing into areas where they have less experience.” 

He continues, “Technology: Artificial intelligence, 3D printing, and virtual reality will be some
of the tools through which manufacturers will try to get closer to consumers and sellers will try
to be efficient in sourcing and production. Companies who can effectively utilize these
technologies will likely win. Finally, there is the search for management talent: Vertical
integration and the use of technology will heavily depend on strong managers who can
coordinate across functions and activities and keep team members engaged. Two types of
managers will be in high demand: those who have experience across selling, moving, making,
and planning and those who can build a culture of cross-disciplinary creativity and teamwork.”

Rennella strongly believes “that in the future, the key for operation strategies 
is video instruction. In fact, we have already implemented this up-to-date technique in our
company. It is a good idea to show everything on a main screen and, what’s more, in short
segments. The first time we made a video with strategies, it lasted almost 20 minutes, and as
soon as we realized a mistake, making adjustments was a real problem. Consequently, we started
recording short videos, no more than seven minutes. In a nutshell, fixed schemes are totally
obsolete in such a volatile worldwide market.”

“The future of operations strategy? That's a tough one,” says Fajardo. “With more and more
analytics and data in play, I suppose the job will only get easier in some respects. A/B testing
won't be as necessary when you already know what the best outcome will be. Even so, the surfeit
of data comes with its own problems. Operations strategists are going to have to be more adept at
knowing what these numbers are and — most importantly — what they 
signify.”