Chapter 3 : Strategic Initiatives for Implementing Competitive Advantages

•  Organizations can undertake high-profile strategic initiatives including
• Supply Chain Management (SCM)
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
• Business Process Reengineering (BPR)
• Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)

1. Supply Chain Management - 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 the resources required to meet customer demand for all products and services
• Supply chain partners - the partners chosen to deliver finished products, raw materials, and services including pricing, delivery, and payment processes along with partner relationship monitoring metrics
• Supply chain operation - the schedule for production activities including testing, packaging, and preparation for delivery. Measurements for this component include productivity and quality
• Supply chain logistics - the product delivery processes and elements including orders, warehouses, carriers, defective product returns, and invoicing
• Effective and efficient supply chain management systems can enable the organization to : 
• Decrease the buyer power
• Increase supplier power
• Increase switching costs
• Create entry barriers
• Increase efficiencies while seeking a competitive advantage through cost leadership

Effective and efficient supply chain managements effect on Porter's Five Forces

   2. Customer Relationship Management - involves managing all aspects of a customer's relationship with an organization to increase customer loyalty and retention and an organization's profitability

• CRM is not just technology, but a strategy, process, and business goal that an organization must embrace on an enterprisewide level
• CRM can enable the organization to
• identify types of customers
• design individual customer marketing campaigns
• treat each customer as an individual
• understand customer buying behaviours

CRM overviews

    3. Business Process Reenginering - analysis and redesign of workflow within and between the enterprise

• The purpose of BPR is to make all business processes best-in-class

• Finding opportunity using BPR

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

   4. Enterprise Resource Planning - 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

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

Chapter 2 : Identifying Competitive Advantage

• Competitive advantage - a product or service that an organization's customers place a greater value on than similar offerings from a competitor
• The five forces model
• buyer power 
• supplier power 
• threat of substitute products or services
• threats of new entrants
• rivalry among existing companies

The five forces model

1. Buyer power - to reduce the buyer power, an organization must make it more attractive to buy from the company not from the competitors
2. Supplier power - suppliers ability to influence the prices they charge for supplies
3. Threat of substitute products and services - an organization would like to be on a market which there are few substitutes of their product or services
4. Threat of new entrants - entry barriers is a product or service feature that customers have come to expect from organizations and must b offered by entering organization to compete and survive
5. Rivalry among existence competitors - high when competition is fierce in a market and low when competitors are more complacent

• The three generics strategies
• cost leadership - becoming a low-cost producer in the industry allows the company to lower prices to customer
• differentiation - create competitive advantage by distinguish their products on one or more features important to their customers
• focused strategy - target to a niche market
• Supply chain - a chain or series of processes that adds value to product and service for customer

Supply Chain diagram

Chapter 1 : Business Driven Technology

Information technology's impact on business operation

• Information Technology (IT) - a field concerned with the use of technology in managing and processing information

          - important enabler of business success and innovation

• Management Information Systems (MIS) - a general name for the 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 beginning to learn about information technology it is important to understand

          - data, information, and business intelligence IT resources

          - IT cultures

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

People use information technology to work with information

• Organizational information cultures :
• Information-Functional Culture - employees use information as a means of exercising influence or power over others
• Information-Sharing Culture - employees across departments trust each other to use information to improve performance
• Information-Inquiring Culture - employees across departments search for information to better understand the future and align themselves with current trends and new directions
• Information-Discovery Culture - employees across departments are open to new insights about crisis and radical changes and seek ways to create competitive advantages