Business Overview : Aic As A Competitive Advantage By Using An Innovative Customer Service Strategy

Alcan's success and enormity are singular in its industry. As a 'highly vertically integrated' textiles and industrial materials manufacturer, the Montreal based firm is markedly profitable and diffusely networked. In spite of its highly enviable track record and profitability, the firm finds itself at a crossroads where its Information Technology (IT) solutions are concerned. With the appointment of Robert Ouellette as Chief Information Officer, Alcan would begin a new phase in its history centered on the reformation of its IT systems. With an emphasis on the improvement of central controls, consistency, cost oversight and personnel orientation, Ouellette would begin the process of transformation by weighing the pros and cons of both the present, outgoing system and the new incoming system. Evidence abounds that the changes rendered through the new IT system will have far-reaching effects in terms of improving the company's operations, efficiency and profitability.

IT organizational restructure includes; hiring 3 more application developers and hiring two more people in the networking team in order to reduce the number of the networking issues for the applications maintained within WW. Application developers will decrease development time of the applications. Current implemented technology for the accounting processes, route optimization, freight tracking and fleet maintenance will need to be improved. All these applications are based on an older technology. In order to improve the overall functionality and to reduce the cost associated with IT requires the organization to implement a cloud computing based ERP solution systems. This system will improve the overall performance and will reduce the cost associated with the implementation. The cloud based applications can be accessed from anywhere and anyone authorized to access the system can access the system easily. The next set of changes that are required in the internal IT strategies are the improvement in the internal processes; all the internal operations are managed in a better way through the new systems. The new systems are targeted to improve the overall operations within the organization (Chand, S 2014). The next change in the IT internal strategy is the IT portfolio. IT portfolio includes implementation of the

Like many of its most profitable competitors, Alcan has grown quickly through insightful series of mergers, acquisitions and rapid product development and launch strategies throughout the major markets it sells into. The company has settled on a highly decentralized divisional business model that has to the point of the case study served them well. Their IT systems are showing signs of massive overduplication of expense, with a $500M level of spending on enterprise applications with SAP being the majority. There are further signs of massive waste in their highly diversified organizational structure. There are 400 systems in the company all dedicated to pricing, a massive duplication of costs, time and effort on the part of IT across the five divisions. There are also over 1,000 concurrent enterprise-class IT systems being used throughout the company at any point in time. Conservatively speaking the company is spending 20% of their total enterprise software spend on maintenance costs alone. This is forcing the CIO, Robert Ouelette, to re-evaluate both the organizational structure and IT systems supporting it. The goals of this analysis are to evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of the existing application or IT management structure. An analysis of the proposal by Robert Ouelette is also provided along with an assessment of it potential effectiveness in solving the challenges is facing today.

Cisco is clearly the one of Information Age companies. Cisco gives the priority on the Information Technology. In the case study, Cisco adopted strategy of systematic acquisitions and strategic partners, which proof that Cisco focuses on cooperated information. Cisco also concerned about standardization, flexibility, extensibility, and scalability. The decisions that Solvik and his team made during this case trends to emphasize how more Cisco becomes closer to the definition of Information Age company. They applied internet and intranet which is not so popular at that year for employee self-service, communication and distance learning, customer

Competition and technology changes in the telecommunications industry has resulted in declining profits for Desert Communications Incorporated (DCI). The competitive business climate in the telecommunications industry requires DCI to initiate proactive strategies to drive profits. The conventional view of the customer contact center is as a cost center for supporting customer relations (Kaiser, 2011). Learning Team B will demonstrate

Because Accenture is a large enterprise, it is difficult for it to coordinate all of it business unit. Every operating business unit is independent of each order. As a whole, there is no internal cooperation between all its businesses. As an example, Accenture as federal services which works independent of Accenture PLC. If one works for Accenture PLC and got a project in Accenture Federal Services, one need to transfer from Accenture PLC to Accenture Federal Services. This is because both unit does not work together even though they are under the same umbrella. There should be internal cooperation between all business unit within Accenture to me the organization evolve into a holistic organization.

Ubisoft has different production, marketing, administrative and Internet teams in different countries. As each department uses different IT systems, managers have an initial problem of whether the IT centres should be centralised or decentralised. Centralisation has its advantages as it offers a rapid system response, it can save money through avoidance of duplicated activities and offers better security. Its disadvantages include if the central unit fails then the entire system will collapse and they might lose touch with the goals of major IT departments.

A company needs to create a series of programs to differentiate their product from those from its competitors and to appropriately price the product to achieve the maximum demand, in order to set up the dynamics of its competitive strategy (David, 2007). The competitive strategy of a company is also expected to offer better products or services to its customers, at a reasonable cost. Due to the mass influence of the external environmental on the customers’ preference, it is vital for the company to develop an available competitive strategy to be able to solve a series of problems, and ultimately to improve the company’s performance. Those problems include: how to differentiate its products or service from competitors, how to create market segments to maximize demands, and how to offer a wider range of products or services to better meet the customers’ needs at more acceptable costs (David, 2007).

Currently their information system (IS) is not fully centralized and this is causing a lot of problem in their expansion and cross-company

In today’s environment, it is extremely essential for retailers to embrace technology in the course of their businesses. This is mainly because a significant number of consumers can be attracted and accessed through technological measures. It is essential to appreciate the fact that data, infrastructure and e-commerce software form the basis of United Parcel Service’s technological superiority. All these tools play a pivotal role in supporting the company’s e-commerce strategy and the company’s business strategy as a whole. One of the key attributes of United Parcel Service is its commitment to investing in researching emerging technologies. This gives it an exceptionally competitive advantage. United Parcel Service (UPS) consistently seeks to embrace technologies that that enhance the company’s efficiency (Russell Baker, 2008). The company’s commitment to technological advancement made the company appear in InternetWeek’s top 100 companies in 2004 (Russell Baker, 2008). On the other hand, InfoWorld ranked the company as the seventh company with the most significant contribution to technological infrastructure.

Although enterprise resource planning (ERP) projects are considered to be a risky investment for any organization, Keda had quite a number of reasons on why it decided to embark on ERP. The introduction of the Keda's silo-based model, as a way of encouraging a decentralized decision-making process, was actually affecting the performance of the Keda business. This was mainly due to the duplication of the identical processing tasks from different business units.

Innovative Widgets is small firm with about 50 employees. The firm provides widgets, which serve as components for machinery used by companies across industries. Innovative Widgets is a very customer centric company. Since it is small company with a specific focus on providing components, it needs to pay attention to the requirements of its customers. Their business model relies heavily in loyal customers, which lead repeat purchases over time. To achieve this, the company has to develop a string service based model to deal with its clients.

Both the internal and external communication responsibilities for ANZ bank lie on the shoulders of corporate communication strategies which includes internal communication and media communication. On an internal basis, the team entitled for this purpose has to ensure that people have the required information which are important to understand to get involved in the work and which is in

Customer service is developed by the patient’s satisfaction and the effect it has on the health care system. Customer service is the face of every business and specially the health care system which it provides leaders with an idea of how the business should look or act. The healthcare systems benefit from the opportunities made by patients. Patients should be the instrument to provide guidance while the physician advocates for the patient’s health. Customer service is a support system between the patient and the physician and without that support system then there is not guidance for a better lifestyle for patients. This is a competitive market that have a few limitations and those limitations start with customer service in healthcare and how to provide the best care for patients. These challenges that the healthcare system face will overcome those obstacles and bring out their best principles to make the system better. Patient centered care relates to customer service and should be recognized as the central focus. High- quality healthcare systems provide satisfaction to patients to show that their experience will be well worth it because their physicians care about their patient’s health.

This paper focuses on studying and researching on how information technology, competitiveness and coordination effect the agribusiness sector. It specifically explained how Information Technology has improved and accelerated the coordination strategies among different stages of the sector. This paper also discusses about how the coordination strategies might not have evolved basing on the existing market structures or price signals.