Evaluate the two requirements for understanding your custome

Evaluate the two requirements for understanding your customers’ requirements:

Order Qualifiers:

Why must companies understand this requirement?

What can you do as an operations manager to improve this requirement?

Order Winners:

What is the main definition and why is it different than Order Qualifiers?

As a professional operations manager, what can you do to differentiate your company from the competition? Please provide examples.

Solution

Order qualifiers refer to the performance dimensions on which the customers expect a minimum level of performance. Companies should understand this requirement to compete as a supplier in the market. The companies need to maintain the same level as its competitors and if the companies fail to perform as order qualifiers they may lose the market. Hence it is very important for the companies to understand the requirement of order qualifiers. As an operations manager I need to formulate the strategy according to the order qualifiers. I need to identify the potential problem areas and strengths, understand the issues surrounding decisions on tradeoffs and prioritize my efforts to ensure performance dimensions.

Order winners are the performance dimensions that differentiate a company’s product and services from that of its competitors. Order winners are different from order qualifiers because performing highly as order winners would help the company to win the customers, but only superior performance on order qualifiers will not give competitive advantage for the company. A company cannot compete in market if they are order winners and do not satisfy order qualifier dimensions. In order to differentiate my company from the competitors, as the operations manager I need to develop strategies that will help to improve the product dimensions that will help to win the market which may include cost, delivery speed and flexibility.

For example we can consider the example of chemical market. The companies need to maintain a certain level of purity for considering as order qualifiers and as an operations manager I need to develop strategies that would ensure minimum level of purity. Once the order qualifier requirements are satisfied, I need to concentrate on developing strategies that will help to reduce cost and delivery speed and ensure flexibility to win the market as order winners.