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Total Quality Management

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TOTAL QUALITY MANAGEMENT
(Topic Review Question)
Topic 2: Quality and Competitiveness Advantage 1. Explain how a total quality perspective can support the six characteristics of competitive advantage introduced at the beginning of chapter.

Total quality is an approach to doing business that attempts to maximize an organization’s competitiveness through the continual improvement of the quality of its product, services, people, process and environment. All the six characteristics of competitive advantage have similarity with total quality where both have the same goals which is to views continuous improvement. Competitive advantage is a firm’s ability to achieve market superiority over its competitors. One of six characteristics of competitive advantage is driven by customer want and needs where company provide value to its customers that competitor do not.

2. Discuss the three basic types of competitive advantage. Can a company achieve all of them?

Competitive advantage is a business concept describing attributes that allow an organization to outperform its competitors and company can achieve all of them. There are three types of competitive advantage:

Cost Leadership:
The goal of cost leadership strategy is to offer products or services at the lowest in the industry. The challenge of this strategy is to earn a suitable profit for the company, rather than operating at loss and draining profitability from all market players. To achieve this, company will emphasize economies of scale and finding competitive advantage from all sources include.

Differentiation:
A company must be unique in its industry along with some dimensions are widely valued by customers. Companies can use differentiation to command premium prices and achieve higher profit. Company use differentiation as source of competitive advantage must make its product or service

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