Featured case: ZARA: Staying Fast and Fresh | The Case Centre, for educators. Felipe Caro, UCLA Anderson School of Management, discusses his award-winning case ZARA: Staying Fast and Fresh. Zara, the flagship brand of the Spanish retail conglomerate Inditex, is one of the leading retailers of fast-fashion, churning out frequent in-season assortment changes of knockoffs of popular runway styles and trendy fashions. The company has received a lot of attention for its centralized distribution model. In the past 10 years Inditex, and more specifically Zara, has been studied by MBA students, the world over, to understand its success in distribution and supply chain efficiency.
Numerous cases have been written to better understand Zara's operations, marketing, information systems, and overall strategy, but most authors alike questioned Zara's long-term sustainability. Nevertheless, Zara's net sales reached 8,088 million Euros in 2010, representing an increase of 14% over the previous year and right in line with the average growth it had shown over the last decade. The Five Competitive Forces That Shape Strategy. Editor’s Note: In 1979, Harvard Business Review published “How Competitive Forces Shape Strategy” by a young economist and associate professor, Michael E.
Porter. It was his first HBR article, and it started a revolution in the strategy field. In subsequent decades, Porter has brought his signature economic rigor to the study of competitive strategy for corporations, regions, nations, and, more recently, health care and philanthropy. “Porter’s five forces” have shaped a generation of academic research and business practice. With prodding and assistance from Harvard Business School Professor Jan Rivkin and longtime colleague Joan Magretta, Porter here reaffirms, updates, and extends the classic work. He also addresses common misunderstandings, provides practical guidance for users of the framework, and offers a deeper view of its implications for strategy today.
In essence, the job of the strategist is to understand and cope with competition. Forces That Shape Competition. Course: U55038: Managing Business Operations (SEP-2013 to DEC-2013) Lean manufacturing. Overview[edit] The difference between these two approaches is not the goal itself, but rather the prime approach to achieving it. The implementation of smooth flow exposes quality problems that already existed, and thus waste reduction naturally happens as a consequence. The advantage claimed for this approach is that it naturally takes a system-wide perspective, whereas a waste focus sometimes wrongly assumes this perspective. Both lean and TPS can be seen as a loosely connected set of potentially competing principles whose goal is cost reduction by the elimination of waste.[5] These principles include: Pull processing, Perfect first-time quality, Waste minimization, Continuous improvement, Flexibility, Building and maintaining a long term relationship with suppliers, Autonomation, Load leveling and Production flow and Visual control.
Origins[edit] Lean aims to make the work simple enough to understand, do and manage. A brief history of waste reduction thinking[edit] 20th century[edit] Inside Zara.