Many of the new pressures from today's manufacturing environment are turning manufacturing managers' attention to the virtues of developing a flexible manufacturing function. Flexibility, however, has different meanings for different managers and several perfectly legitimate alternative paths exist towards flexible manufacturing. How managers in ten companies view manufacturing flexibility in terms of how they see the contribution of manufacturing flexibility to overall company performance; what types of flexibility they regard as important; and what their desired degree of flexibility is. The results of the investigations in these ten companies are summarised in the form of ten empirical “observations”. Based on these “observations” a check‐list of prescriptions is presented and a hierarchical framework developed into which the various issues raised by the “observations” can be incorporated.

A crucial stage in the formulation of operations strategy is the derivation of a ranked (or rated) list of competitive factors such as quality, flexibility, cost, etc. This list is used either to infer an appropriate set of strategic operations decisions or alternatively it is used in conjunction with an independently derived list of the organization's performance to prioritize each of the competitive factors. Martilla and James[1] take the latter approach to derive an importance-performance matrix. The investigations reported in this article examine how the matrix can be modified to reflect managers' perceived relationships between "importance", "performance" and "priority for improvement". Two investigations are reported; one deals with operations improvement at the level of the whole operations function, the other at the level of the department or micro-operation. A different zoning of the importanceperformance matrix to that used by Martilla and James is proposed.Using the modified matrix allowed the managers who participated in the investigation to explore improvement priorities in their operations in an effective manner. One of the more significant activities in the operations strategy formulation process is the derivation of a list of competitive factors (also called critical success factors, performance objectives or competitive variables) which is prioritized in terms of the relative importance of each competitive factor. Typically such a list ranks or rates those factors which the operations function contributes to the competitiveness of the organization. So, for example, quality may be regarded as more important than product or service range but less so than price, and so on. All the significant methods of operations strategy formulation include some prioritization, for example Hayes and Wheelwright[2], Hill [3], Fine and Hax[4] and Platts and Gregory [5]. Many of these methods are discussed in Voss [6].After this list has been formulated it can be used in two ways:(1) As a translation device between the market aspirations of the organization and the various areas of operations strategy (often divided into structural and infrastructural decisions as in Hayes and Wheelwright[2]). For example, Hill's[3] well-known method of manufacturing strategy formulation uses these competitive factors in this way.

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Operations strategy is a term that is often used to indicate one of the two departures from the better‐known term, Manufacturing Strategy.

The paper presents a brief history of the development of operations management (OM). This provides the backdrop for a content analysis of journal articles published in the Journal of Operations Management and the International Journal of Operations & Production Management between January 1990 and June 2003. MBA student survey data are then used to explore any gaps that may exist between the focus of academic research and the perceived importance of given OM subject areas to practitioners. The practical and conceptual insights highlighted are then used as the basis for a discussion of extant research priorities. The paper concludes with a preliminary conceptual framework that distinguishes between OM research seeking to consolidate operations practice and that which seeks to apply theoretical concepts into a practical context.

Queuing theory (also called waiting line theory) is a mathematical approach that models random arrival and processing activities in order to predict the behavior of queuing systems.

The concept of the “trade‐off” is increasingly seen as central to operations strategy because it forms the foundation of how we conceptualise the improvement process. A case‐based methodology is employed to explore managers’ cognition regarding the idea of operations trade‐offs. Findings from the five case studies examined indicate that the idea of trade‐offs is not the problematic issue for practising managers that it is for academics, indeed it is an easily understood concept which describes the operational compromises routinely made by managers. The significance of specific trade‐offs within any operation is likely to be governed by two factors. These are, first, the degree of “importance” of the trade‐off, in terms of the impact it will have on overall operations competitiveness. The second is the “sensitivity” of the trade‐off. Sensitivity is the degree of change that will be caused to one element of the trade‐off when changes are made to the other.

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