Chapter Three

Strategic Initiatives for Implementing Competitive Advantages.

1. The four basic components of 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.

a)Supply chain strategy – strategy for managing all resources to meet customer demand.

b)Supply chain partner – partners throughout the supply chain that deliver finished products, raw materials, and services.
c)Supply chain operation – schedule for production activities.
d)Supply chain logistics – product delivery process.

2. Customer relationship management systems and how they can help organizations understand their customers.

a)Involves managing all aspects of a customer's relationship with an organization to increase customer royalty and retention and an organization's profitability.

b)Allows an organization to gain insights into customers' shopping and buying behaviors in order to develop and implement enterprise-wide strategies.

3.Business process Reengineering.

a)Business Process

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

b)Business Process Reengineering (BPR)

-The analysis and redesign of workflow within and between enterprises.
-The purpose of BPR is to make all business process the best-in-class.

c)Seven Principles Of BPR

-Organize around outcomes, not tasks.
-Identify all the organization's processes and prioritize them in order of redesign urgency.
-Integrate information processing work into the real work that produces the information.
-Treat geographically dispersed resources as though they were centralized.
-Link parallel activities in the workflow instead of just integrating their results.
-Put the decision point where the work is performed, and build control into the process.
-Capture information once and at the source.

d)Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)

-Integrates all departments and functions throughout an organization into a single IT system (or integrated set of IT systems) so that employees can make desicions by viewing enterprise wide information on all business operations.

e)How can ERP improve an organization business?


-Many organizations fail to maintain consistency across business operations.
-If a single department decides to implement a new system without considering the other departments, inconsistencies can occur throughout the company.
-Not all systems are built to talk to each other and share data, and if sales suddenly implements a new system that marketing and accounting cannot use or is inconsistent in the way it handles information, the company's operations becomes siloed.
-The issue ERP intends to solve is that knowledge within a majority of organization currently in silos that are maintained by a select few, without the ability to be shared across the organization, causing inconsistency across business operations..

Chapter Two

Identifying Competitive Technology.


1. Competitive advantages are typically temporary.

-Competitive advantage a product or service that an organization's customers place a greater value on than similar offerings from a competitor.
-Competitive is temporary because competitors keep duplicate the strategy.
-The company should start the new competitive advantage.

2. The five forces in Porter's Five Forces Model.

a)Buyer power.
-High when buyers have many choices of whom to buy.
-Low when their choices are few.
-To reduce buyer power to and create competitive advantage an organization must make it more interesting and attractive to buy form company not from the competitors.
-Best practices of IT - based.
 - Loyalty program in travel industry (example: rewards on free airlines tickets or hotel stays)

b)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 then open the bidding to any supplier who would care to bid Reverse auction is an auction format which increasingly lower bids.

c)Threat for substitute products and services.

-High when there are many alternatives to a product or service.
-Low when there are few alternatives from which to choose.
-Ideally, an organization would like to be on a market in which there are few substitutes of their product or services.
-Example, electronic product -same function different brands.

d)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.
-An entry barrier is a feature of a product or service that customers have come to expect and entering competitors must offer the same for survival.
-For example, a new bank must offer its customers an array of MIS- enabled services, including ATMs, and online bill paying ( Maybank and CIMB)

3. The three Porter's generic strategies.

Porter's three generic strategies.

a)Cost leadership 

-Becoming a low-cost producer in the industry allows the company to lower prices to customers.
-Competitors with higher costs cannot afford to compete with the low-cost leader on price.

b)Differentiation

-Create competitive advantage by distinguishing their products on one or more features important to their customers.
-Unique features or benefits may justify price differences.

c)Focused Strategy 

-Target to a niche market.
-Concentrates on either cost leadership or differentiation.

4. Value Chain Analysis - Executing Business Strategies.

a)Supply chain.
-A chain or series of processes that adds value to product & service for customer.
-Add value to its products and services that support a profit margin for the firm.

Chapter One

Business Driven Technology.

1.Management information system and information technology.

Management information system.
 -Provides information that organizations need to manage themselves efficiently and effectively.
 -Typically computer systems used for managing five primary components hardware, software, data, procedures  and people.
 -To the study of how individuals, groups, and organizations evaluate, design, implement, manage, and utilize systems to generate information to improve efficiency and effectiveness of decision making.

Information technology.
-It is a field concerned with the use of technology in managing and processing information.
-The term information technology has ballooned to encompass many aspects of computing and    technology.
-Information technology in and of itself is not useful unless the right people know how to use and manage it.
-Information technology can be an important enabler of business success and innovation.

2. The relationship among people, information technology and information.

Information
-Data is raw facts that describe the characteristic of an event. 
-Example: the number of Uitm Melacca students.
-Information is data converted into a meaningful and useful context.
-Example: the number of students in each faculty. 
-Business Intelligence is applications and technologies that are used to support decision-making efforts. 
-Example: the number of dean list student in each faculty. 
-The people use information technology to work together to get more information. 

3. Departments in a typical business and how technology help them to work together.

-Accounting, records measures and report monetary transactions.
-Sales, performs the function of selling goods and services.
-Operation management, manages the process of converting or transforming resources into goods or  services.
-Marketing, supports sales by planning, pricing, and promoting goods and services. 


4. Types of organizational information cultures.  

Information technology cultures.
-Functional culture is when the employees use information as a means of exercising influence or power over others. Every manager in the organization do their task to make the job more easier.  
-Sharing culture is when the employees across departments trust each other to use information to improve performance. 
-Inquiring culture is when the employees across departments search for information to better understand the future and align themselves with current trends and new directions.
-Discovery culture is when the employees across departments are open to new insights about crisis and radical changes and seek ways to create competitive advantages.