CHAPTER 3: STRATEGIC INITIATIVES FOR IMPLEMENTING COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGES

STRATEGIC INITIATIVES

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

Supply Chain Management

1. Software that involves in managing information flows between and among stages in a supply chain to maximize total supply chain effectiveness and profitability.
2. Four basic components of supply chain:
• Supply chain strategy - managing all resources to meet customer demand.
• Supply chain partner - partners that deliver finished products, raw materials, and services.
• Supply chain operation - schedule for production activities.
• Supply chain logistics - product delivery process.
3. Effective and efficient SCM systems can enable an organization to:
• Decrease the power of its buyer
• Increase its own supplier power

Customer Relationship Management

1. Involves managing all aspects of a customer's relationship with an organization to increase customer loyalty and retention and an organization's profitability.
2. CRM is not just technology, but a strategy, process and business goal that an organization must embrace on an enterprise wide level.
3. CRM can enable an organization to:
• Identify types of customers
• Design individual customer marketing campaigns
• Treat each customer as an individual.
• Understand customer buying behaviours.

Business Process Reengineering

1. Business process - a set of activities that accomplish a specific task, such as processing a customer's order.
2. Business process reengineering (BPR) - the analysis and redesign of workflow within and between enterprises.
3. A company can improve the way it travels the road by moving from foot to horse and then horse to car.

Finding Opportunity Using BPR

1. BPR looks at taking a different path, such as an aeroplane which ignore the road completely.
2. Types of change an organization can achieve, along with the magnitudes of change and the potential business benefit.

Enterprise Resource Planning

1. 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.
2. The keyword in ERP is "enterprise"
3. ERP systems collect data from across an organization and correlates the data generating an enterprise wide view.

- END OF CHAPTER 3 -