Achieve Profitable Organization Growth, 3 ways to create Sustainable Competitive Advantage

Most companies are in business to survive, grow and thrive. An organization can achieve profitable organization growth through three (3) ways to create sustainable competitive advantage. Sustainable competitive advantage is what makes an organization's products or services more desirable to customers than that of any of its rivals. Competitive advantage refers to factors that allow a company to produce goods or services better or more cheaply than its rivals. These factors may be grouped into two (2) categories; comparative advantages, and differential advantages, which are the derivative components of competitive advantage.

A firm can achieve sustainable competitive advantage by implementing and executing value creation strategy not simultaneously being implemented by any current or potential competitors. ​For a firm to achieve a state of sustainable competitive advantage it must acquire and control valuable, rare, inimitable and unsubstitutable resources and capabilities, and core competencies to absorb and apply those resources to enhance its competitive ability. ​These factors allow the productive organization to generate more sales or superior margins compared to its market rivals leading to sustained profitable organization growth. ​

Strategic Engine
Operations Engine
Strategic engine underlying the strategic management decision process supports a strategy hierarchy model which captures the strategic decisions made in the organization. The strategy hierarchy is composed of three (3) levels: corporate strategy, business strategy, and operations strategy levels. The Strategic Engine defines how the organization should evolve in order to achieve sustainable competitive advantage leading to long-term success - sustainable profitable organization growth.

The strategic engine defines competitive advantage as an emergent property of the organization as system. This property is derived from the combination of corporate level comparative advantage, business level differential advantage, and operations level comparative advantage (i.e.,economies of scale). A strategy hierarchy model is company specific, customized to the company's own situation and performance objectives. The three (3) levels of strategy hierarchy model are interrelated through a specific dual integration, built through a vertical orientation: top-down and bottom-up. The success of both approaches is reinforced by functional strategy such as; marketing, finance, IT, HR, sales, etc., that appear simultaneously at all three levels of the strategy hierarchy. ​​The whole engine activity/processing is synchronized by functional strategy that provide resources and capabilities to all three (3) strategy levels. In case synchrony is lost due to lack of proper resources and capabilities, no strategy will generate any advantage for the company.
Operations engine is an abstraction of systemic decision model underlying the the operations management process which allows the organization to efficiently manage the current value chain of activities. The current value chain activities drive the creation and delivery of customer value, and achievement of operational objectives. The value chain activities include production and manufacturing areas as well as business function areas such as marketing, finance, sales, HR, and customer service.  The purpose of the Operations Engine is to keep the current activities in the organization moving and functioning at peak levels. 

 The Operations Engine model - Operations system - is a joint configuration of processes and resources and resulting competencies that are aligned with the organization's desired competitive position. The Operations system is utilized by operations management to provide the best match of supply capacity with customer demand. It aligns organizational distinctive competencies and effective capacity with demand to ensure cost effective creations and delivery of value.

The Operations Engine implements the Operations Strategy design decisions, and enables an organization to capture and integrate operations management operational - daily - decisions about customers, suppliers, employees, and products. This involves ​the functional areas in the value chain, each with its own set of needs; that the company must determine how to address.   

Sustained profitable organization growth requires organizational capability to successfully manage the interplay of strategic and operations engines to create sustainable competitive advantage. The Strategic Engine is driven by strategic decisions, judgment, and actions of management that shape the nature and direction of an organization. Strategic management decisions are the means by which management's intentions and ideas are realized through the strategy model. They link rhetoric (what people say), choices (what people decide and are willing to pay for), and actions (what people do) in shaping the nature and direction of an organization. The strategic engine model is useful for managers seeking to understand, safeguard and enlarge their company's potential sources of competitive advantage. The Operations Engine supports operations managers' decisions in efficiently managing the day-to-day activities of the organization across functional areas to achieve performance efficiency in creating value at reasonable costs. ​
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