What role can top management play in helping a company achieve superior efficiency, quality, innovation, and responsiveness to customers?
The role that top management plays in helping a company achieve superior efficiency, quality, innovation, and responsiveness to customers is of the utmost importance. Managers put into play functional - level strategies that have a huge impact on a company’s performance and helps the company to create a competitive advantage over the competition. It is through the selection and use of functional - level strategies that increases the benefit or utility that a customer can get from a company. It is these benefits that then can assist in creating a competitive advantage.
There are several steps to increase efficiency. In this unit we learn that these are; Economies of Scale, Learning Effects, Experience Curve, Flexible Manufacturing and Mass Customization, Marketing, Materials Management and Supply Chain, R&D Strategy, Human Resource Strategy, Information Systems, and Infrastructure. Managers can improve efficiency and quality through the use of the Human Resource Strategy by hiring and training employees that can produce at a faster and more accurate manner, and accuracy increase quality and being able to produce faster increases efficiency. Through the use of Information Systems companies can increase their innovation, efficiency, quality and responsiveness to customers because Information Systems automates the company’s activities. This is particularly useful in the responsiveness to customers because it creates a link between the company and the customers and due to the automation makes this process much quicker than traditional means. Choosing which strategies and their implementation is the responsibility of top management; therefore they play a key role in helping company’s achieve their