Many foreign firms have been successful in the following areas: steel, autos, cameras, and televisions. Are services more protected from foreign competition? How?
It is commonly said that Japanese firms employ 10 times as many engineers per operations worker as US firms and 10 times fewer accountants. What effect would you expect this to have on their competitiveness? Why?
What are the order winners and order qualifiers for Wal-Mart? Toyota? BMW? Sony?
Is the DMAIC approach more applicable to project focusing on incremental change to radical change? Why?
Are there any limitations you see associated with QFD?
Although Six Sigma has been used by some big organizations and achieved huge success, many firms are not engaged in this approach. Why do you think that some firms avoid Six Sigma?
Why are some firms not engaged in the benchmarking process? Are any of the reasons valid? Why or why not?
What phase of DMAIC do you imagine is the most important phase? What phase do you imagine takes the longest?
Given the recent trends in products and services, does the focus strategy and sand cone strategy seem most applicable these days?