Hayes and Cartwright Four Stage Model

In order to achieve a competitive advantage, it is essential to not only know yourself as an organization, yet equally as important is to know how your organization is in comparison to your competitors. The four-stage model by Hayes and Cartwright that we find in Slack and Lewis illustrates for a company the level its operations are contributing via the two performance measures of increasing strategic impact in addition to the increasing levels of operations capabilities (Slack and Lewis, 2011, p.241).

Within the Hayes and Cartwright Model, four stages are introduced that illustrate the level at which we see a company contributing to the overall firm's strategy through:

Stage 1: Internally neutral: Here the operations are simply not contributing anything positive towards the overall competitiveness of the firm (Slack and Lewis, 2011, p.241).

Stage 2: Externally neutral: At this stage operations are beginning to look outward at their competition and are seeking to implement the best practices of their most successful competitors through the process of bench-marking, and how it significantly departs from stage 1 is that it is no longer doing anything that is holding the company back (Slack and Lewis, 2011, p.241).

Stage 3: Internally supportive: Reaching a stage of maturity, operations have now grown where they are now on equal footing with the industry leaders and where they able to excel at aspects that enable them to remain highly competitive by linking strategy to operations (Slack and Lewis, 2011, p.241).

Stage 4: Externally supportive: The significance of this stage, is that operations have now progressed to a point where they driving strategy and providing the necessary foundations towards the success of its future in the marketplace (Slack and Lewis, 2011, p.241).

As we have seen within the four-stage model by Hayes and Cartwright, its value lies in how as we can see by stage 4, the operations are providing a solid foundation through its contributions that enable the business strategy's competitive edge goals to be met. The company's operations have evolved from being simply reactive during stages one and two, to one in which by stage four operations is playing a key role in the implementation of the firm's competitive strategies (Al-Rasby et al, n.d, pp.2-3).

In conclusion, within business analysis, many tools such as SWOT and PEST are used in order to assess a company's relative market position or what factors a company needs to analyse while striving to enter the market. I would place the Hayes and Cartwright Model as one that can be useful as it allows one to target its operations and use the model as a means to asses one's market status in relation to the position of one's rivals. It provides a method to assess a slow and steady growth strategy