Operations and Business Systems Management (OBSM) - Business Studies Essay

Operations and Business Systems Management (OBSM) - Business Studies - Essay Example ny prioritizes some competitive criteria, according to market tendencies and concentrates its efforts to get a competitive position relating to concurrence’ (Santos et al., 2000, 2). The above issue was also examined by Rand (1999) who found that one of the most important advantages for a company that operates in the modern market is ‘visibility’ which was defined by Rand as ‘the capability to see and to understand the condition of the revenue-producing process as the revenue plan unfolds; the condition of the process is determined by the products position in the supply chain relative to the actual demand, i.e., the process is in good condition if the product and all of its components can be moved from their location in the process through the balance of the process in time to meet the date the product is scheduled to be shipped’ (Rand, 1999, 97). The above issues have to be considered when evaluating the corporate strategy followed by a company withi n a particular industrial sector. In this paper, Toyota is used as a ‘sample’ firm in order to investigate the level of effectiveness of corporate strategic plan as it is usually structured in most manufacturing companies around the world. The particular elements of the above company’s strategy (i.e. the most significant parts of its strategic plan) are then used in order to test the company’s ability to achieve its targets with a special reference to the ‘process types’ and ‘layout types’ that the company has chosen to use within the borders set by its strategic plan. Finally, the capacity strategy adopted by the organization is identified and evaluated taking into account the company’s internal and external environment and mostly its competitors both in the local and the global market. Toyota Motor Corporation is one of the most significant corporations in the automobile industry. The company was founded in 1894 and has soon become one of the world’s leading competitors in its area of