Significant time was spent in class assignments and exercises in exploring that

Question

Significant time was spent in class assignments and exercises in exploring that the process selected by a firm for a product or service must fit with a specific combination of volume and variety—that is there are some combinations of expected product volume and the variety (flexibility) of items produced that produce a good “strategic fit”, and other combinations that produce a poor strategic fit. Give an example of a volume and variety that would be a poor strategic fit—and explain what might be done to change the process to make the fit better.

Explanation / Answer

In order to understand the fitment of volume and variety, we must first understand the company’s strategy. Let us take an example of a product that has done extremely well in the last decade. The iPhone from Apple.

One of the strategic goal of Apple has been to create an ecosystem that works well with one another and has the least amount of bugs and glitches within systems. However, in order to do that there needed to be tight control on hardware and software production. The quality of hardware between different business units (computers, music players, phones) had to be easily compatible and the software needed to be seamless. In order to do that, they reduced the variety of the phones that they manufacture. If we look at the iOS, we can see that at the current generation they are only available in 3 models. The same cannot be said about Android. Naturally this meant that Android had a far more customizable options but was more prone to bugs and glitches. So naturally in order to maintain their strategic goal, Apple decided to have low variety but high volume (to meet the market demand whenever needed).

An example of Apple’s volume and variety that would be a poor strategic fit would be to focus on high variety and low volume. This would mean that the iPhones would not be easily available and whenever they are they would be cumbersome and difficult to use on a regular basis. This is in contrast to what they have implemented currently.

While this is a hypothetical situation (mentioned above in the example) the fix for this could be done in two ways. The process of approaching the problem needs to be fixed in order to stay in line with the strategic goals. There could be two things that is done

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