Strategic Initiatives
Organizations can undertake high profile strategic initiatives including:

  • Supply Chain Management (SCM)
  • Customer Relationship Management (CRM) 
  • Business Process Re-engineering (BPR)
  • Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)

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


Four basic components:
  1. Supply chain strategy - strategy in managing all resources to meet customer demand
  2. Supply chain partner - partners throughout chain that deliver finished products, raw materials and services
  3. Supply chain operation - schedule for production activities
  4. Supply chain logistics - product delivery process

Wal-Mart and Procter & Gamble (P&G) SCM




Effective and efficient SCM systems can enable on organization to:

  • decrease buyer power
  • increase supplier owner
  • increase switching costs to reduce threat of substitute products/services
  • create entry barriers thereby reducing threat of new entrants
  • increase efficiencies while seeking a competitive advantage through cost leadership


B) 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.
  • Charles Schwab and Kaiser Permanente - obtained great success through implementation of CRM systems. 
  • not just technology, but a strategy, process, and business goal that an organization must embrace on an enterprisewide level

CRM enable an organization to:
  • identify types of customers
  • design individual customer marketing campaigns
  • treat each customer as an individual
  • understand customer buying behaviours
CRM Overview



C) Business Process Reengineering (BPR):
  • 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
  • Purpose? - to make all business processes best-in-class

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



 Progressive Insurance Mobile Claims Process




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


D) Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP):
  • intergrates all departments and functions throughout an organization into a single IT system so that employees can make decisions by viewing enterprise-wide information on all business operations 
  • Keywords of  ERP: "enterprise"




ERP Systems collect data from across an organization and correlates the data generating and enterprise-wide view.



The End of Chapter 3: Strategic Initiatives for Implementing Competitive Advantages by syahirahzfri. 
Thank you for reading :)
Competitive Advantage
What is competitive advantage?

 Wikipedia:
a condition or circumstance that puts a company in a favorable or superior business position.

"expansion is vital to maintaining a competitive advantage"

  • product/service that organization's customer place a greater value on than similar offerings from a competitor
  • temporary because competitors keep duplicate the strategy
  • Then, company should start a new competitive advantage



The Five Forces Model


Buyer Power:

  • High - when buyers have many choices of whom to buy
  • Low - when their choices are few
  • To reduce buyer power - organization must make it more attractive to buy from the company not form the competitors.
  • Best practices of IT based 
  • Example: Loyalty program in travel - rewards on free airline tickets/hotel stays

Supplier Power:
  • High - when buyers have few choices of whom to buy from
  • Low - when their choices are many
  • Best practices of IT to create competitive advantage
  • Example: B2B marketplace - private exchange allow a single buyer to posts it needs and opens the bidding to any supplier who would care to bid.
  • Reverse auction - auction format in which increasingly lower bids. 

Threat of Substitute products & Services:

  • High - when there are many alternatives to a product or service
  • Low - when there are few alternatives from which to choose
  • ideally, on organization would like to be on a market in which there are few substitutes of their product or services
  • Best practices of IT
  • Example: Electronic product - same function different brands
Threat of New Entrants:
  • High - when it is easy for new competitors to enter a market
  • Low - when there are significant entry barriers to entering a market
  • Entry barriers - product/service feature that customers have to come to expect from organizations and must be offered by entering organization to compete and survive.
  • Best practices of IT
  • Example: New bank must offers online paying bills, acc monitoring to compete

Rivalry among existence competitors:

  • High - when competition is fierce in a market
  • Low - when competition is more complacent 
  • Best practices of IT
  • Example: Wal-mart and its suppliers using IT - enabled system for communication and track product at aisles by effective tagging system
  • Reduce cost by using effective supply chain
Walmart



The Three Generic Strategies





The End of Chapter 2: Identifying Competitive Advantage by syahirahzfri. 
Thank you for reading :)

What is information technology?


"It is the study or use of systems (especially computers and telecommunications) for storing, retrieving, and sending information" - Wikipedia

How information technology (IT) impact on business operations?

Basically, information technology (IT) creates less of need for manual labor. Technology provides a wide range of tools entrepreneurs can use to guide their new companies through the startup and growth stages. Small-business accounting, marketing and communication have been revolutionized by advances in computer, network and communications technology, and businesses in a range of industries continually adapt to take full advantage of technological developments.

Understanding information technology provides great exposure to everyone in learning about business.




Information Technology Basics

Information Technology (IT): 
  • a field of concerned with the use of technology in managing and process information
  • important enabler - business success and information

Management Information Systems (MIS):
  • general name for business function and academic discipline 
  • covering the application of people, technologies and procedures to solve business problems
  • business function similar to Accounting, Finance, Operations and Human Resources

When learning about Information Technology, it is important to understand:



  • Data - raw facts that describe the characteristic of an event
  • Information - data converted into a meaningful and useful context
  • Business Intelligence - applications and technologies used to support decision-making efforts





    • IT RESOURCES



    IT Cultures

    • Information-Functional Culture - Employee use information as exercising influence over others.
    • Information-Sharing Culture - Employee across departments trust each other use information (problems) to improve performance.
    • Information-Inquiring Culture - Employee across departments search for information to better understand the future and align themselves with current trends and new directions.
    • Information-Discovery Culture - Employee across departments are open to new insights about crisis and radial changes and seek ways to create competitive advantages, 



    The End of Chapter 1: Business Driven Technology by syahirahzfri. 
    Thank you for reading :)