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.