CHAPTER THREE - STRATEGIC INITIATIVES FOR IMPLEMENTING COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGES
STRATEGIC INITIATIVE
- Organizations can undertake high-profile strategic initiatives including:
- 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:
2. Supply Chain Partner - partners throughout the supply chain that deliver finished products,
raw materials, and services
3. Supply Chain Operation - schedule for production activities
4. supply Chain Logistics - product delivery process
- Effectiveness and efficient SCM systems can enable an organization to:
- 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
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 enterprise wide level
- CRM can enable an organization to:
- Design individual customer marketing campaigns
- Treat each customer as an individual
- Understand customer buying behaviours
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
- Reengineering the Corporation - book written by Michael Hammer and James Champy that recommends seven principles for BPR
FINDING OPPURTUNITY USING BPR
- A company can improve the way it travels the road by moving from foot to 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 RESOURCES PLANNING
- Enterprise resources planning (ERP) - integrates 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
- Keyword in ERP is 'enterprise'
- ERP systems collect data from across an organization and correlates the data generating an enterprise wide view
OPENING CASE STUDY QUESTIONS
Apple - Merging Technology, Business, and Entertainment
1. Evaluate how Apple can gain business intelligence through the implementation of a customer relationship management system
2. Create an argument against the following statement: 'Apple should not invest any resources to build a supply chain management system
3. why would company like Apple invest in BPR?