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Chapter 20 Organizing for improvement 613
Figure 20.8 Nine-point scales for judging importance and performance
Order winners
Qualifiers
Less important
Judging importance to customers
In Chapter 3 we introduced the idea of order-winning, qualifying and less important competitive
factors. Order-winning competitive factors are those which directly win business for
the operation. Qualifying competitive factors are those which may not win extra business if
the operation improves its performance, but can certainly lose business if performance falls
below a particular point, known as the qualifying level. Less important competitive factors, as
their name implies, are those which are relatively unimportant compared with the others.
In fact, to judge the relative importance of its competitive factors, an operation will usually
need to use a slightly more discriminating scale. One way to do this is to take our three broad
categories of competitive factors – order-winning, qualifying and less important – and to
divide each category into three further points representing strong, medium and weak positions.
Figure 20.8(a) illustrates such a scale.
Judging performance against competitors
At its simplest, a competitive performance standard would consist merely of judging whether
the achieved performance of an operation is better than, the same, or worse than that of
its competitors. However, in much the same way as the nine-point importance scale was
derived, we can derive a more discriminating nine-point performance scale, as shown in
Figure 20.8(b).
The importance–performance matrix
Importance–performance
matrix
The priority for improvement which each competitive factor should be given can be
assessed from a comparison of their importance and performance. This can be shown on
an importance–performance matrix which, as its name implies, positions each competitive