Exam 2: Competitiveness, Strategy, and Productivity

For firms competing in worldwide markets, conducting __________________ is more complex, since what works in one country or region might not work in another.

Companies are required to use environmental scanning because of both federal and state regulations regarding environmental pollution control.

Which of the following is not a key factor of competitiveness?

Standardization has the advantage of reducing variability.

The fundamental purpose for the existence of any organization is described by its:

Strategy includes both organizational and functional strategies.

An example of a tactical operations management decision is determining employment levels.

Which of the following factors would tend to reduce productivity?

In the 1970's and 1980's in the USA, organizations concentrated on:

Which of the following is true?

A company has introduced a process improvement that reduces processing time for each unit, so that output is increased by 25% with less material, but one additional worker required.Under the old process, five workers could produce 60 units per hour.Labor costs are $12/hour, and material input was previously $16/unit.For the new process, material is now $10/unit.Overhead is charged at 1.6 times direct labor cost.Finished units sell for $31 each.What increase in productivity is associated with the process improvement?

The hierarchy and sequence of planning and decision-making is: mission, organizational strategy, tactics, and operational decisions.

Time-based approaches of business organizations focus on reducing the time to accomplish certain necessary activities.Time reductions seldom apply to:

Product design and choice of location are examples of _______ decisions.

Government statistics are a good source of data about productivity trends in the service sector.

A business that is rated highly by its customers for service quality will tend to be more profitable than a business that is rated poorly.

Which of these factors affects productivity?

An example of an operational operations management decision is inventory level management.

Gourmet Pretzels bakes soft pretzels on an assembly line.It currently bakes 800 pretzels each 8-hour shift.If the production is increased to 1,200 pretzels each shift, then productivity will have increased by:

Outsourcing tends to improve quality but at the cost of lowered productivity.