Order qualifiers

Order qualifiers—Those competitive characteristics that a firm must exhibit to be a viable competitor in the marketplace. For example, a firm may seek to compete on characteristics other than price, but in order to qualify to compete, its costs and the related price must be within a certain range to be considered by its customers. 

Notice that the value equation contains the competitive priorities and that these are also the order-winning and order-qualifying characteristics. To... 

Fig. 9.4 Listing of criteria describing order qualifiers and order winners , referring to Gilmour et al. (1994)...

However, the most important issues to be determined in this context with regard to the requirements of a specific customer segment are the order qualifiers and order winners . This concept, initially developed by Hill in 1985 (Hill 1993), comes from the field of manufacturing theory. Christopher and Towill (2000), however, adapted it and developed a wider supply chain oriented concept. 

The order qualifiers represent the characteristics of a product or service required in order for a customer to consider purchasing it. 

Based on a survey, Gilmour et al. (1994) generated a ranking of criteria which are important for satisfying the customers depicted in Fig. 9.4. Hence, it shall be determined which criteria describe the order qualifiers and the order winners hest as requirements that a given customer segment possesses. 

Order qualifiers are factors that are regarded by the market as an entry ticket. Unless the product or service meets basic performance standards, it will not be taken seriously. An example is quality accreditation a possible supplier to major utilities such as PowerGen in Britain and EOF in France would not be considered seriously without ISO 9000 certification. And delivery reliability is a must for newspapers - yesterday s news is worthless. Note that, in both examples, order qualifiers are order-losing sensitive loss of ISO 9000 accreditation would make it impossible to supply to major utilities, and late delivery of newspapers would miss the market. 

What were the order winners and order qualifiers at TA ... 

Suggest order winning and order qualifying criteria for the following product environments ... 

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