The Nature Of Operations Strategy And Its Contribution To Performance- The Case Of KPLC
Abstract
Increased environmental changes in regionalisation, globalisation, technological advances and
political reforms in Kenya are leading to increased liberalization. Partial liberalization of some
sectors indicate that many Kenyans are willing to abandon the formerly protected service
providers in favour of the emergent competitors who are showing increasingly improver
performance as opposed to the protected parastatals. This paper studies the operations strategy
of KPLC to find the extent to which operations strategy is entrenched and its visibility and the role
operations strategy has played in the results achieved in an attempt to show that operations
strategy plays an important role in the success of a firm and is therefore indispensable in the ever
dynamic environment of hyper competition.
To achieve the objective, a questionaire was given to 120 members of Top and Middle level
Management of KPLC, comprising structured questions on operations strategy. Analysis of the
data indicated that operations strategy is entrenched only to a little extent at KPLC implying that
operations strategy is only developed, deployed, adhered to and recognised as crucial for the
survival of the organization in a competitive environment only to a little extent. The results also
show that operations strategy contributed little to the achieved results of KPLC. Finally the results
show that there has been only little improvement in selected performance indices and there was
no one area with outstanding improvement.
On the basis of the study it was recommended that KPLC needs to build its competencies in a
particular area in which competitors cannot cope so as to stay ahead of competitors and in
particular, find a way of locking in its customers so that they cannot be taken over by its
competitors.The limitations of the study were recognised as failure to give room for respondents to
give personal views that may differ from the reseacher's and that the study merely considered
Nairobi's Top and Middle level Management KPLC performance may not be uniform countrywide
and if the same research was conducted country wide covering all employees it may give different
results. On suggested further research it was proposed to conduct the research company wide
and to consider employees who were left out to see what difference it will make to the results.
Citation
Masters thesis University of Nairobi (2006)Publisher
University of Nairobi. School of Business Studies
Description
Degree of master of Arts in Business Administration