How should the improvement effort be linked to strategy?
■ At a strategic level, the whole purpose of operations improvement is to make operations
performance better serve its markets. Therefore there should be approximate alignment or ‘fit’
between an operation’s performance and the requirements of its markets. In fact, improvement
should do three things to achieve this:
1 It should achieve an approximate balance between ‘required market performance’ and
‘actual operations performance’.
2 It should make this alignment ‘sustainable’ over time.
3 It should ‘move up’ the line of fit, the assumption being that high levels of market performance,
achieved as a result of high levels of operations performance are difficult for
competitors to match.