Saturday 21 October 2017

Chapter 3

CHAPTER 3 - Strategic Initiatives for Implementing Competitive Advantages

Strategic Initiatives

- Organizations can undertake high-profile strategic initiatives including:

  1. Supply chain management (SCM)
  2. Customer relationship management (CRM)
  3. Business process re-engineering (BPR)
  4. Enterprise resource planning (ERP)
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:
  1. Supply chain strategy - strategy for managing all resources to meet customer demand
  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. 
-Effective and efficient SCM systems can enable an organization to:
  • Decrease the power of it 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


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 - a standardized set of activities that accomplish a specific task, such as processing a customer's order.

Business process re-engineering (BPR) - the analysis and redesign of workflow within and between enterprises
 - The purpose of BPR is to make all business processes best-in-class

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) - Integrates all departments and functions throughout an organization into a single IT system so that employees can make decisions y viewing enterprisewide information on all business operations

*keyword in ERP is 'enterprise"

-ERP system collect data from across an organization and correlates the data generating an enterprisewide view.





                                                           THANK YOU

No comments:

Post a Comment