Exam 4: Building Competitive Advantage Through Functional-Level Strategies

Cream Cups bakes cakes in several varieties dedicated to special occasions. It also allows its customers to personalize the cakes according to their personal preferences. This is an example of:

Distinctive competencies shape the functional-level strategies that a company can pursue.

There is a negative relationship between the length of time that a customer stays with a company and profit per customer.

____ refers to unit cost increases associated with a large scale of output.

Close integration between research and development (R&D), production and marketing can help a company avoid innovation failures.

When Amber first started working at a car manufacturing plant assembling car doors, she was slower at the task than her co-workers. As time passed, her speed at assembling the doors increased and she even taught others how to perform the task more quickly. As a result of increased employee productivity, this particular plant experienced cost savings. These cost savings can be attributed to learning effects.

Quality can best be thought of as:

Strong brand loyalty leads to more sales and the ability to charge higher prices.

Distinctive competencies shape the _____ strategies that a company can pursue.

Six Sigma encompasses the activities necessary to get inputs and components to a production facility, through the production process, and out through a distribution system to the end user.

You are a consultant offering advice to a large manufacturing firm about ways to increase its distinctive competency in customer responsiveness. What suggestions would you offer? Be specific and detailed in your answer.

Mass customization describes the ability of companies to use flexible manufacturing technology to reconcile the two goals of low cost and differentiation through product customization.

Customer focus in a function of only the lower levels of an organization.

Production and materials-management functions need not be changed in response to unanticipated customer demands as they do not affect response time.

All else being equal, if a company moves down the experience curve faster than its rivals, it should realize a lower cost structure.

Flexible production technologies allow a company to produce a wider variety of end products at a unit cost that at one time could be achieved only through the mass production of a standardized output

The concept of economies of scale suggests that unit costs continue to fall indefinitely as output volume increases.

Learning effects are a result of:

Which of the following is not a benefit of tight cross-functional integration among research and development (R&D), production, and marketing?

Research and development (R&D) can help a company improve quality by: