Business strategy- A long-range plan for a business.

Operations strategy- A long-range plan for the operations function that specifies the design
and use of resources to support the business strategy.
Mission- A statement defining what business an organization is in, who its customers are, and
how its core beliefs shape its business.
Environmental scanning- Monitoring the external environment for changes and trends to
determine business opportunities and threats.
Core competencies-The unique strengths of a business.
Competitive priorities- Capabilities that the operations function can develop in order to give
a company a competitive advantage in its market.
Cost- A competitive priority focusing on low cost.
Quality- A competitive priority focusing on the quality of goods and services.
Time- A competitive priority focusing on speed and on-time delivery.
Flexibility- A competitive priority focusing on offering a wide variety of goods or services.
Trade-off- The need to focus more on one competitive priority than on others.
Order qualifiers- Competitive priorities that must be met for a company to qualify as a
competitor in the marketplace.
Order winners- Competitive priorities that win orders in the marketplace.
Structure- Operations decisionsrelated to the design of the production process, such as
facilities, technology, and flow of goods and services through the facility.
Infrastructure- Operations decisions related to the planning and control systems of the
operation, such as organization of operations, skills and pay of workers, and quality measures.
Productivity- A measure of how efficiently an organization converts inputs into outputs.
Total productivity- Productivity computed as a ratio of output to all organizational inputs.
Partial productivity- Productivity computed as a ratio of output to only one input (e.g., labor,
materials, machines).
Multifactor productivity-Productivity computed as a ratio of output to several, but not all,
inputs.