Production and Operations Management Systems Chapter 1: Introduction

The Stages of P/OM Development (continued)

• Stage I companies operate on the premise that there is no competitive advantage to be gained by changing the production process.
• Stage IV companies practice continuous improvement (CI), which means that they persistently remove waste. They aggressively seek to innovate in their unswerving pursuit of quality for competitive dominance.
• Stage IV companies have a high level of basic advantages that are unique to them, whereas Stage I companies have virtually none of these advantages.
• Stage II and III companies fall in-between on various scales of performance and degrees of advantage.
• The next slide shows various characteristics of these four stages.