The book uses three complementary views of operations—the competency, resource, and process view--and contains integrating case studies. Consequently, the book has four parts:

Part 1 Competency View

Describes the concept of operations strategy and illustrates how trade-offs among operational competencies (such as cost, quality, responsiveness, and flexibility) can provide competitive advantage.

Part 2 Resource View

Introduces the resource view and shows how to tailor real assets to business strategy. Four chapters analyze four important resource decisions: sizing (how much capacity is appropriate?), timing (when to expand or contract?), type (what kind of flexibility is needed?), and location (where do we place assets in a global network?)

Part 3 Process View

Shows how to tailoring activity networks to business strategy. Four chapters analyze four important processes in any operation: strategic sourcing (managing inputs), demand and revenue management (managing outputs), risk management and operational hedging, and improvement and innovation management (preparing for the future).

Part 4 Case Studies

Presents three business cases that integrate various elements of the book. The Harley-Davidson case investigates the four resource decisions, the Seagate Technology case studies operational hedging, and the Peapod case illustrates demand and revenue management and mass customized services.

Educational Philosophy of the Book

This book explains the principles of operations strategy and describes how companies can apply these principles in practice to increase value.  Designing and implementing a successful operations strategy require judgment, experience, creativity, and luck, all of which cannot be taught.  What can be taught, however, are the concepts, principles, and tools to help you in that process---and therein lies the purpose of this book.

“Principles and practice” is the guiding motto throughout this book. Going beyond telling war-stories, the author describes the practice of operations strategy while revealing its driving principles in a structured manner.  

Each chapter opens with a description of how a real company practices some aspect of operations strategy and then reviews the concepts behind that practice. Tools are provided to analyze the concepts, distill their principles, and suggest guidelines for implementation and improvement. When appropriate, state-of-the-art research findings are integrated in the discussion. Each chapter closes with a mini-case that asks you to explore how you would apply the principles and tools in practice. The last part of the book contains a set of “full-blown” cases to integrate the chapters and emphasize the relevance of our topic to practice.

To increase accessibility, most analysis is described in words and is exhibited with minimal notation and mathematics. For example, equations are stated only if they capture a relationship better than words alone can. To increase usefulness and illustrate implementation, a particular example of each analysis is worked out in a spreadsheet (all spreadsheets can be downloaded from www.vanmieghem.us). More advanced analysis or spreadsheet implementations are relegated to appendices for those who are interested.

Operations strategy evaluation is as much art as it is science.  The book adopts a dual perspective that combines qualitative analysis with a financial evaluation of the value created by the operations strategy. Throughout this book, value is our yardstick and our guide to assess and improve operations strategy. Merging the strategic and financial perspective should be natural to the intended reader:

This book is written with a specific focus on MBA and engineering management students, and on their instructors.  While the book naturally follows a core course in operations and supply chain management and adopts basic financial evaluation, all concepts are explained “from scratch” to make the book accessible to every business or engineering management student. The book should also be of interest to consultants and practitioners as a reference for concepts, principles, and tools.

Distinguishing Characteristics

This book presents a novel structured approach of using analysis to build intuition in Operations Strategy and reveal improvement levers within a coherent framework, which facilitates learning and instruction.  Reviewers at world-leading institutions provide distinguishing characteristics for the book:

About The Author

Jan A. Van Mieghem

Harold L. Stuart Distinguished Professor of Managerial Economics and Professor of Operations Management at the Kellogg School of Management of Northwestern University, Dr. Van Mieghem is the chairman of the Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences department.  He teaches a variety of operations courses in Kellogg's full-time and executive programs.  His research focuses on manufacturing, service and supply chain operations and studies both strategic questions as well as tactical execution. His articles have appeared in the leading journals of the field.  He is past editor of the operations and supply chain area of Operations Research and has served on the editorial board of several journals.  Professor Van Mieghem is the co-author of the MBA textbook Managing Business Process Flows: Principles of Operations Management.  He received his Ph.D. from the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University in 1995. Born in Belgium, he currently lives in Evanston, Illinois, with his wife and four children.