Questions on Chapter 3
1. How we define value creation and how that is related to competitive advantage?
A) Value Creation is a process of creating value to a firm’s product and or service. A firm usually follows a chain of steps (value chain) to create value to its product or service in the market.
A company’s competitive advantage and its sustainability is directly proportional to the value it creates for its products among the customers.
Value creation can be achieved by the following features of the products or services which form the basic building blocks of the competitive advantage. They are
a) Superior quality of the product/service
b) Efficiency of the firm
c) Innovation ability of the firm and
d) Customer responsiveness
2. What is value chain and how it is related to efficiency?
A Value Chain is a series of activities a company performs to create value for its products and or service in the market. Michael Porter identified five generic types of activities which are most common in the majority of the firms. These activities are interrelated to each other and may include sub-activities and support activities. Support activities of a firm play a crucial role in building competitive advantage over its rivals.
The generic activities form the primary value chain of the company which are listed below.
a) Inbound Logistics
b) Operations
c) Outbound Logistics
d) Marketing and Sales
e) Service
The Chain consisting of generic activities can be depicted as below (Michael
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)
Under Mike Porter’s Value Chain analysis every organization has primary activities and support activities. Primary activities are inbound logistics, operations, outbound logistics, marketing and sales, and customer service. Support activities are infrastructure, human resource management, technological development, and procurement. For a conglomerate like Disney creating value is done by leveraging all the outputs of its various segments to benefit the others.
Value chain is a set of activities a company performs in order to provide a valuable solution to their customer problem in their market space or industry. The value chain is made up of primary and support activities. Primary activities being research and development, production, marketing and sales and customer service. These are the primary steps that are required to get a product or service to market to solve the customer problems. Some of the secondary steps include company
A value chain analysis is a strategic analysis of an organization that uses value creating activities (Dess, McNamara, & Eisner, 2016, p. 76). The value chain analysis describes a company’s activities and relates them to an analysis of the competitive strength of the company
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 series of activities that are enacted by a firm that add value to a product beyond the cost of the production are referred to as the value chain. Harley Davidson offers a combination of superior performance and unique attributes within its value chain that promotes their core competencies and provides them with a competitive advantage.
Value creation means increase the value of products, service and even business to meet the customers’ needs and requirements so that they can get competitive advantages. (Business Fundas, 2012) As we analyzed, fast food industry’s threat of new entrants is low and the availability of substitutes is high. It’s a fare market which the buyers have strong powers.
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 innovation can be achieved by implementing a focus on innovation and creation of new market possibilities (Value Innovation, 2015). Kim and Mauborgne explains how innovative companies beat their competitors by creating products or services for which there aren’t any present. With value innovation it doesn’t mean that a company develops or creates new goods or services. The goal of value innovation is to create new demands in efforts to change the market as well as make competitors irrelevant. Value innovation can improve existing services as well as lower the cost for the company and their customers.
Value chain is an approach to know how an item or activities create value for consumers. The most of value provides to consumers, the most of competitive advantage an organization build. In this analysis, value chain model has separated into primary and support activities. Primary activities are included in the physical creation of the item and service. On the other hand, support activities give the inputs and infrastructure that enable the primary activities to happen. This value chain model can be refer to below figure 5.
In order to achieve competitive advantage, a firm must perform one or more value-creating activity that is more superior compared to other competitors. Superior value is created through lower costs or superior benefits to the buyers.
Calculating value added, could also contribute to determine a strategy of differentiation of products in businesses. Lets take the previous example NIKE. Nike has a low vertical integration but a high value added (thanks to its logo). Since this value added is marketing, value added is in this case an intangible entity. Differentiation is one of the competitive advantages.
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.
Value Chain Analysis describes the activities that take place in a business and related to the business core competencies. It can classify by primary activities and supporting activities.