Sunday 12 July 2015

Chapter 3 Strategic Initiatives for Implementing Competitive Advantages

Strategic Initiatives
Organizations can undertake high-profile strategic initiatives including:

  • Supply chain management (SCM)
  • Customer relationship management (CRM)
  • Business process reengineering (BPR)
  • Enterprise resource planning (ERP)

Supply Chain Management

Supply Chain Management (SCM) – involves the management of information flows between and among stages in a supply chain to maximize total supply chain effectiveness and profitability

Four basic components of supply chain management include:
  • Supply chain strategy – strategy for managing all resources to meet customer demand
  • Supply chain partner – partners throughout the supply chain that deliver finished products, raw materials, and services.
  • Supply chain operation – schedule for production activities
  • Supply chain logistics – product delivery process
Wal-Mart and Procter & Gamble (P&G) SCM


Effective and efficient SCM systems can enable an organization to:
  • Decrease the power of its buyers
  • Increase its own supplier power
  • Increase switching costs to reduce the threat of substitute products or services
  • Create entry barriers thereby reducing the threat of new entrants
  • Increase efficiencies while seeking a competitive advantage through cost leadership
Effective and efficient SCM systems effect on Porter’s Five Forces


Customer Relationship Management 

Customer relationship management (CRM) – involves managing all aspects of a customer’s relationship with an organization to increase customer loyalty and retention and an organization's profitability

Many organizations, such as Charles Schwab and Kaiser Permanente, have obtained great success through the implementation of CRM systems

CRM is not just technology, but a strategy, process, and business goal that an organization must embrace on an enterprisewide level

CRM can enable an organization to:
  • Identify types of customers
  • Design individual customer marketing campaigns 
  • Treat each customer as an individual
  • Understand customer buying behaviors


Business Process Reengineering 

Business process – a standardized set of activities that accomplish a specific task, such as processing a customer’s order

Business process reengineering (BPR) – the analysis and redesign of workflow within and between enterprises
  • The purpose of BPR is to make all business processes best-in-class
Reengineering the Corporation – book written by Michael Hammer and James Champy that recommends seven principles for BPR


Finding Opportunity Using BPR

A company can improve the way it travels the road by moving from foot to horse and then horse to car

BPR looks at taking a different path, such as an airplane which ignore the road completely

Types of change an organization can achieve, along with the magnitudes of change and the potential business benefit

Enterprise Resource Planning

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) – integrates all departments and functions throughout an organization into a single IT system so that employees can make decisions by viewing enterprisewide information on all business operations

Keyword in ERP is “enterprise”

ERP systems collect data from across an organization and correlates the data generating an enterprisewide view


















No comments:

Post a Comment