Excellent companies simultaneously achieve superior quality and reliability, lower prices, and higher flexibility compared to their competitors. This contradicts the traditional operations management paradigm that trade-offs exist among competitive capabilities. Accordingly, this study examines the cumulative model and the sandcone model as new frameworks for enhancing competitiveness, proposes an integrated model that modifies these models, and conducts an empirical analysis of Korean manufacturing firms based on the integrated model. The empirical results reveal the existence of both excellent firms with high capabilities across all competitive factors and inferior firms with universally low capabilities, and this classification of competitive capability groups validates the integrated model. Furthermore, the performance of production activities was found to play a critically important role in improving competitiveness. This study identifies the limitations of the trade-off model and proposes a new integrated approach for strengthening competitiveness. If future research conducts empirical comparative analyses of each model and undertakes comparative studies with firms in competitor nations, a more theoretically grounded and practically useful model for enhancing competitiveness will emerge.