Exam 9: Value Chain Management: Functional Strategies for Competitive Advantage

Flexible manufacturing is a strategy based on the use of manual labor to reduce the costs associated with the product assembly process or the way services are delivered to customers.

_____ is a management technique that focuses on improving attributes of an organization's products such as superior design, features, reliability, and after-sales support.

Using the Internet to manage the value chain reduces the costs of coordination both between the company and its customers and between the company and its suppliers.

Quality is a concept that can be applied to manufacturing but not to service organizations.

Total quality management requires the cooperation of managers of certain functions of an organization.

Discuss the necessity of satisfying customer demands. List some of the general product attributes or qualities that most customers prefer.

An approach that creates teams of expert change agents known as "green belts and black belts" to take control of problem finding, problem solving, and training other employees in implementing solutions is called _____.

A _____ is a plan of action to improve the ability of each of an organization's departments to perform its task-specific activities in ways that add value to an organization's goods and services.

Successful innovation gives an organization something unique about its products that can strengthen its competitive advantage.

_____ is the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business procedures to achieve dramatic improvements in critical measures of performance such as cost, quality, service, and speed.

The greater the rate of technological change in an industry, the more important it is for managers to innovate.

An organization gains competitive advantage when it:

The members of a team who bear primary responsibility for the success of a project and who stay with a project from inception to completion are called:

A written agreement that details product development factors such as responsibilities, resource commitments, budgets, time lines, and development milestones is called a contract book.

In order to design for ease of production, a company should:

Which of the following is true about the members of a self-managed team?

People often respond poorly to greater autonomy and responsibility; the use of empowered self-managed teams decreases productivity and efficiency.

The _____ plan specifies all of the relevant information that managers need to decide whether to go ahead with a full-blown product development effort.

The fewer the inputs required to produce a given output, the lower is the efficiency and the higher the cost of outputs.

The implementation of customer relationship management (CRM) is a method of improving an organization's _____.