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Order Winner & Order Qualifier

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COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE AND COMPETITIVE PRIORITIES Many factors shape and form the operations strategy of a corporation, for example, the ever increasing need for globalizing products and operations and thus reducing the unit cost, creating a technology leadership position, introducing new inventions, taking advantage of mass customization, using supplier partnering, and looking for strategic sourcing solutions. All of these factors require an external or market-based orientation; these are the changes that take place in the external environment of the company. Traditionally, strategic decisions were thought of as "big decisions" made by general managers. However, big strategic decisions may not be the only source of competitive …show more content…

Therefore, firms must provide the qualifiers in order to get into or stay in a market. To provide qualifiers, they need only to be as good as their competitors. Failure to do so may result in lost sales. However, to provide order winners, firms must be better than their competitors. It is important to note that order qualifiers are not less important than order winners; they are just different. Firms must also exercise some caution when making decisions based on order winners and qualifiers. Take, for example, a firm producing a high quality product (where high quality is the order-winning criteria). If the cost of producing at such a high level of quality forces the cost of the product to exceed a certain price level (which is an order-qualifying criteria), the end result may be lost sales, thereby making "quality" an order-losing attribute. Order winners and qualifiers are both market-specific and time-specific. They work in different combinations in different ways on different markets and with different customers. While, some general trends exist across markets, these may not be stable over time. For example, in the late 1990s delivery speed and product customization were frequent order winners, while product quality and price, which previously were frequent order winners, tended to be order qualifiers. Hence, firms need to develop different strategies to support different marketing

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