Describe Your Company'S (Client’S) Progress Within Each

Decision making and communication are at the center of business success and efficient business analytics would only be effective through the use of proper information systems and that are up to date with current trends as well as optimizing on the available channels.

Imagine you are part of a strategic planning group at a large corporation that is considering developing a new proposed product. The marketing director has asked your team to do a competitive market analysis to determine the product’s potential success. The analysis will focus on your primary competitor in the product’s market.

The four pillars of analytics competition are (1) Support of a strategic, distinctive capability, (2) an enterprise-level approach to and management of analytics, (3) Senior management commitment, and (4) Large-scale ambition (Davenport & Harris, 2007).

In order to be an effective analytical competitor, Davenport and Harris (2007) assert that firms must meet certain prerequisites. Those prerequisites are at least a moderate amount of quality data about the type of business that analytics will support, hardware and software, the commitment of managers to develop analytics, and executive sponsorship (Davenport and Harris, 2007, p.16). Analytics is about extrapolating new information and

Chapter 4) to gain insights into how our customers are talking about and engaging with our brand. Monitoring competitive market intelligence through the use of competitor analysis (Identifying key competitors; assessing their objectives, strategies, strengths and weaknesses, and reactions patterns; and selecting which competitors to attack or avoid. Chapter 18) will also allow us to make better strategic decisions by understanding the current consumer environment, tracking competitor actions, and providing warnings for potential opportunities.

own campaigns. It is important to develop a suite of tools to assist the partner sales

The fear of surviving in this ever demanding global economy and markets has led some firms and companies using analytics in an unethical way. One example is how IFA one of the largest sellers of life and health insurance in United States bought customer data from grocery chain from Shopsense supermarket in order to earn profits and have a competitive edge over its rivals. In response to this strategy adopted by IFA , George Jones, CEO of Borders Group commented that the data which is collected from Shopsense can be misleading as people shop for an entire family. It seems that he might not be consuming the food he has in his basket maybe it is for his kids, friends. He might be shopping for someone else. I think from customers

MarketSoft founded by Greg Erman, in 1999 had designed an innovative software product that addressed the problem of managing sales leads across the “extended enterprise”. The product eLeads was strategically developed upon extensive research to address three critical areas many of the fortune 1000 companies in the modern times are facing: 1.Leads get lost 2. No qualifying systems for the leads exist and 3.The leads are never tracked.

2. Uniqueness - There is no single path to follow to become an analytic competitor, and the way every company uses analytics is unique to its strategy and market position. Accenture 's use of analytics has always been unique to acquire the market position. Accenture, in telecommunication industry uses bundle

Currently, Vygon USA is not in a strong position to compete on analytics. Our ability to use data and information we have access to as a company is at the most basic level. We have our IT manager send out a monthly standard report he puts together including sales for that month, products sold, etc. It is broken down into buckets of information, that as a whole is good for an individual just wanting to know how much of each product we sold or what the sales per product group were for the month. As a competitive advantage the basic monthly report is not enough for me or anyone else to use for a strategic plan.

As Harris and Davenport mention in “Competing on Analytics”, it is extremely necessary for management to support and commit to integrating analytics in order for a company to become an analytical competitor. (Davenport and Harris, 2007) Specific to Impax, there has been a lot of recent change in management and minimal push down to incorporate analytics for better decision making. While we are capable and do utilize a fair degree of analytics in our day to day operations, unfortunately, I find its use tends to be more retroactive in nature than proactive.

Part 2. How Business Analytics can be used to gain advantage in a competitive marketplace

“Competing on Analytics” defines an analytical competitor “as an organization that uses analytics extensively and systematically to outthink and out execute the competition.”(1) Business analytics is a new way for companies to separate themselves from their competitors. I recently completed an internship at the firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and will work there full-time upon completion of this program. PwC uses analytics to help solve complex business issues and to identify opportunities across different industries. PwC is the largest professional service company in the world and is part of the Big Four accounting firms. PwC operates in over 157 countries with more than 750 offices throughout the world.(2) PwC is structured into three service lines, which are Assurance, Advisory and Tax. The assurance practice audits almost 30% of the global fortune 500 companies.(2) The advisory practice is mainly consulting activities that cover strategy, cyber security and privacy, human resources, deals and forensics. (2) These three practices generated $35.4 billion in revenue in 2015. (2)

I would review our corporate strategy and look at the progress of achieving our objectives. I would assign a team to analyze our current processes and evaluate them in order to discover areas that are doing well and areas that require improvement. We could then decide how to solve these problems while also continuing to reach our objectives. I would employ constraint management and the theory of constraints in order to identify factors that are limiting our systems performance and are restricting output. The theory of constraints would be utilized to increase our profits by improving and speeding up workflow. A team would be assembled to manage constraints and adjust the processes to be less constrained with shorter setup times. The Drum-buffer-rope system can help regulate and control flow so production does not get backed up and the manufacture of our soup and cracker products can run more efficiently. Since we are adding new soups, we need to make product mix decisions such as how many cans of each soup should be produced at any given time. The contribution margin, or the amount each product contributes to profits and overhead, is important to making product mix decisions. The cash cow products should be favored and run more often in order to increase profits. Rebalancing the assembly line is necessary because we have a new product, chicken noodle soup, so we need to plan our schedules to include this new product and its setup times, cost, number sold and

Operating – ABC has traditionally competed on operating efficiency thus, ABC may not have operating expertise necessary to compete extensively on analytics. ABC needs to create an organizational level of expertise through the implementation of IT architecture, data scientist skillsets, and a comprehensive objective to implement these tools and skills.