Why a Strong Operations Strategy is the Key for New Growth

For most organizations, success doesn’t occur randomly but rather because of a series of properly timed decisions. In other words, meticulous planning, preparation, and implementation determine how successful most organizations are. All this starts with the formulation of a sound strategy.

In this post, we’ll take an in-depth look at why a strong operations strategy is vital for new growth. Let’s dive in.

What is an operations strategy?

Operations strategy refers to a plan formulated by an organization’s management team to allocate resources to the business—it helps the organization examine and implement efficient and effective systems to attain the overall corporate objectives. It usually develops after the creation of the overall business strategy. As such, operations strategy helps support the strategic direction of an organization.

A well-crafted operations strategy brings about the creation of cost-effective production and support capabilities. It also delves into the various types of technology that develops in-house or acquired. Plus, it outlines the set of suppliers from which the firm chooses to obtain goods and services.

What are the techniques used in achieving operations strategy?

Some of the techniques used in attaining operational strategy include:

• Value chain analysis: This is the process through which an organization identifies its primary and support activities that enhance the value of its final product or service. Furthermore, it is the full range of tasks, including production, marketing, and distribution, that an organization undertakes to bring a product or service from conception to delivery.
• Benchmarking: This is the search for industry best practices that spark superior performance. This tool is useful to compare the performance of a firm’s products and services with the best performance of other firms both inside and outside the industry. Comparing your business to those of competitors is crucial when competing. Without it, it’ll be difficult to determine how good your performance is in relation to other firms in the industry.
• Activity based costing (ABC): This technique identifies activities in an organization. It then assigns the cost of each activity to all products and services based on the actual consumption of each. ABC traces resource consumption and the costing of final outputs.
• Value proposition analysis: It is a promise of the value stated by a business that summarizes the way the benefit of the business’s product or service is acquired, delivered, and experienced. Basically, a value proposition specifies what makes a given company’s product or service attractive, why customers should buy it, and how the value of the product or service is superior to similar offerings.

Ways a strong operations strategy promotes new growth

A strong operations strategy entails refining and specifying an organization’s business strategy and formulating strategic initiatives and operational plans aimed at enabling business units and departments to successfully implement the overall business strategy. There are numerous benefits of having a strong operation strategy within your organization. They include:

1. Improved employee efficiency

Operations strategy outlines the goals of different business units and departments, thereby ensuring that team leaders and employees know what they are working to achieve. An operations strategy helps ensure that any employee contributing to an operation makes use of their time and skills efficiently. Moreover, organizational leaders can easily determine which departments are operating efficiently and those which may need improvement to spark growth.

2. Promotes department cooperation

An operations strategy defines how the tasks of various departments within an organization interrelate and how they can work together. By outlining how departments coordinate, each department understands how it is related to the others. They can identify how an individual department’s goals are helping the organization attain its overall goals together with other departments. As such, it is beneficial for enhancing the decision-making process and helping employees across departments in an organization feel like they are on the same team.

3. Better resource management

Organizations usually have limited amounts of resources. This makes it vital that the resources are used efficiently. Operations strategy helps the management determine specific areas in the organization that need the most resources and how best to deliver those resources. Further, it also helps leaders identify departments that aren’t using resources effectively—they can then come up with measures to improve those departments. By formulating an operations strategy, leaders can also learn about the costs of running various departments in the organization. They can analyze these costs and determine whether they are in line with the overall organizational goals.

4. Improved customer experience

A strong operation strategy should include discussions around customers, their expectations, and how to meet and exceed these expectations. By formulating a standard of care, businesses can clearly define ways in which customers should be treated. As such, it helps standardize the customer experience so that customers feel valued instead of feeling left out. This assurance also helps customers understand what they can expect from an organization every time they interact with it. In essence, an operations strategy helps make customers happy. Needless to say, happy customers always come back.

5. It promotes reliability

One of the main building blocks of an operations strategy lies in formulating a standard and staying true to it. No matter what product or service a business offers, the business shows confidence in the work. Good reliability relies on proper testing—and an operations strategy. One in which outlines specific instructions on testing and research conducted at every developmental stage. It should also outline information about how this information should be used for future developments.

6. It helps with market penetration

A strong operations strategy should focus on capturing a large segment of the target customer market. Among how market penetration can be determined include the rate at which leads are converted to buying customers. In this sense, the operations strategy may require that you channel more resources to your marketing campaign to penetrate the market.

Bottom line: implementing a strong operation strategy is the way to go to spark new growth

Operations strategy drives an organization’s operations—the part of the business that deals with the production and distribution of products and services. It underlies the overall business strategy and is vital to remaining competitive in the ever-changing market. With a strong operations strategy, organizations can optimize the use of resources, processes, people, and technology.

If you wish to learn more about digital marketing and how to achieve growth with a sound operations strategy, feel free to reach out to BrandCraft today.