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The Supply Chain’s Significance in Developing an Operations Strategy:

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The supply chain’s significance in developing an operations strategy:

To get an insight in what operations strategy is all about, it is defined as "a set of competitive priorities coupled with supply chain structural and infrastructural design choices intended to create capabilities that support a set of value propositions targeted to address the needs of critical customers." (Operations and Supply Chain Strategy, 2009).

A supply chain consists of multiple organizations linked together in a partnership and their overall goal is to satisfy the needs of the end customer.
As the lecture notes (n.d.) points out, operations manage the activities of the entire supply chain from start to end. Because of the operations management's nature of spanning across the functional level and being integrative, it is involved in many other strategic areas. (Operations and Supply Chain Strategy, 2009). This means that strategic decisions regarding operations must reflect and involve these areas.

Increasingly fierce competition and challenges like fast changing market demands and needs, demand uncertainty and decreasing product life cycle means organizations have to do things differently to stay in the game. In today’s competitive environment there is a need to excel in multiple performance objectives like flexibility, speed, cost, dependability and quality (Slack and Lewis, 2011, p.16). To cope with these challenges, an integrated approach to the supply chain is required to create a competitive advantage. This leads us to a statement by Gunasekaran, Lai and Cheng (2008) that “Supply chain management (SCM) has been considered as the most popular operations strategy for improving organizational competitiveness in the twenty-first century.” In the light of this information the operations strategy must be developed both internally and for the supply chain in its entirety. In an

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