Enterprise Technologies And The Value Chain

In order for a firm to create competitive advantage, it needs to create a set of activites that can deliver value to the specific product and services it offers to its customers. To start talking about my life as a “value chain”, I may need to compare it to a specific product”. This is going to take precedence both in my personal life and professional life.

The value chain, made by Michael Porter, is really important to see how a company structure is created. The value chain is constituted by two parts: support activities (firm infrastructure, human resource management, technology development, procurement) and primary activities (inbound logistic, operations, outbound logistic, marketing and sales, service). (Johnson et al. 2011, p.97-99)

“A value chain is a set of activities that an organization carries out to create value for its customers. Porter proposed a general-purpose value chain that companies can use to examine all of their activities, and see how they 're connected. The way in which value chain activities are performed determines costs and affects profits, so this tool can help you understand the sources of value for your organization.” (https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newSTR_66.htm) With this in mind, we will be taking a look at Tesla Motors.

One of Porter’s main contributions was Porter’s value chain. The value chain is all the activities an organization undertakes to create value for a customer. According to Porter, there are two ways to gain an edge over competitors. A firm must provide comparable but value but perform the activities on the chain at a lower cost, or; Perform services in a unique way

“Competitive Advantage introduces the concept of the value chain, a general Framework for thinking strategically about the activities involved in any business and assessing their relative cost and role in differentiation”. Michael Porter, (1985).

Effective value chain as a competitive advantage can contribute significantly to the prosperity of a firm in the competitive arena, but it can cause dire situations if not operated properly (Guy, 2011). However, there are conflicts among companies as to how stakeholders think they gain competitive advantage. Porter (1996) suggests: A company can outperform rivals only if it can establish a difference that it can preserve. It must deliver greater value to customers or create comparable value at lower cost or do both.

Value chain is the ability to take a product and add some value along the way to make it appealing to the customers in such a way that they be willing to buy the product at a certain price. Many companies in today’s business world analyze their value chains to identify the ways which continue to attract their customers. The value chain analysis consist of two parts, primary activities and secondary activities. The first ones support the actual physical process of buying, manufacturing, shipping and selling the product and the secondary activities are actions that support the process, such as procurement, technical support and human resource management.

The basic principle in defining the value chain, according to Michael Porter (Porter, 1985), is that the activities include a variety of disaggregations from the below three perspectives. First, they have different economics, implying that these activities are functioning in different segments of the market. Second, even though the economics differentiation is not that evident, isolated activities should have a potential impact for it. Third, value-adding activities have significant input scale.

Over the years, technology has become a major part for a business and for an individual as well. Technology has become so advance that it has made a major effect for the staff as well as for the customers. New technology has helped in many areas such as data and information storage, advertising, transportation and communication.

What is enterprise technology and what can it do for the value chain? Enterprise technology refers to the concept of “information technology (IT) resources and data that are shared across an enterprise”(MITRE, 2013). The benefits of implementing such technologies include increased agility, greater access to wider and more competitive talent pools, the ability to act fast,

A value chain is a chain of activities that a firm operating in a specific industry performs in order to deliver a valuable product or service for the market. The concept comes from business management and was first described and popularized by Michael Porter (Porter, 2013)

Value chain has been increasingly used in businesses as a tool to increase cooperation between production chain units in order to decrease delivery times of products/ services to consumers and coordinating communication between those units, this in return will reduce inventories and increase customer satisfaction. Enterprise technology has been used as an important tool in streamlining business process and making the value chain of an organization better. Its use has played a significant role in the coordination all the business processes in organizations from warehousing, procurement, production, marketing and sales, quality control and delivery to customers. The different technologies used include; Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management and Supply Chain Management.

The value chain analysis (shown in appendix) was also generated by Michael Porter. This model is referred to “identifying ways to increase the efficiency of the chain” (Investopedia, n.d.). Furthermore, the overall objective is to produce maximum value with minimum total cost and establish a competitive advantage.

A. Introduction: This assignment is having a case study on Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation of International Game Technology (IGT), a manufacturer of slot machines , that how they use SAP’s ERP systems and what problems and benefits they got

A value chain is nothing but a set of activities that a firm operates to deliver a much valuable and quality product or services in the market. The term comes from Business management and was firstly coined by Mr. Michael Porter in his best seller.