If a company's managers are trying to create a cost-based competitive advantage and make it difficult for rivals also pursuing to win a low-cost advantage to quickly copy its cost-saving successes (because the information in the FIR and the Competitive Intelligence Report does not reveal everything a company is doing to cut costs), then managers should consider O identifying cost-effective actions/expenditure decisions at each plant that will lower manufacturing costs per pair produced and investing in plant upgrades that improve the company's cost competitiveness vis-a-vis rivals opting not to invest in these same upgrades. placing limited reliance on winning contracts for celebrity endorsements (because the costs often outweigh the benefits), avoiding producing and marketing more than150 models/styles of branded (to keep production run setup costs low), and keeping capital investments to a bare minimum (so as to have lower depreciation costs than rivals). Obuilding enough plant capacity to capture a larger global market share of both branded and private-label footwear than any other company in the industry and thereby spread fixed costs out over more pairs solo. O having at least 2 million pairs of plant capacity in each geographic region (to avoid paying tariffs on footwear imports and minimize adverse exchange rate impacts), producing and marketing branded footwear with no higher than a 4-star S/Q rating (to avoid all the extra costs associated with producing branded footwear with a higher S/Q rating), avoiding overtime production (because of the added labor costs), and not bidding for celebrity endorsement contracts (so as to avoid the probability of having to pay a celebrity more than the benefits gained). not spending much to gain the very limited benefits associated with best practice training of plant employees, keeping the compensation of plant employees to amounts that are below he industry average in every region where it has plants, and doing every it can to be the biggest supplier of private-label footwear to chain retailers Copying, redistributing, or website posting is expressly prohibited and constitutes copyright violation. Copyright O2018 by Glo-Bus Software, Inc. df