Value Chain Analysis: Literature Review and Application on Ikea

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)

'How do the main functional areas of a business interact and contribute to its effective management?'

IDENTIFY AND REVIEW THE RELEVANT RANGE OF OPERATIONS AND THE SPHERE OF BUSINESS ARRANGEMENTS OF THE ORGANISATION

Selecting a business strategy that details valuable resources and distinctive competencies, strategizing all resources and capabilities and ensuring they are all employed and exploited, and building and regenerating valuable resources and distinctive competencies is key. The analysis of resources, capabilities and core competencies describes the external environment which is subject to change quickly. Based off this information a firm has to be prepared and know its internal resources and capabilities and offer a more secure strategy. Furthermore, resources and capabilities are the primary source of profitability. Resources entail intangible, tangible, and human resources.

“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).

In order for the strategy to be successful it should realistically assess the company’s internal resources. An internal analysis is used to identify the strengths of the company and identifies the weakness to overcome in the strategy. The internal analysis will help with understanding the internal issues that exist at StilSim by evaluating a value chain analysis, a resource analysis, core competencies and a stakeholder analysis.

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.

It provides a structure to capture the linkage of organizational activities that create value for the customer and profit for the organisation. It is particularly useful to get across the notion that operations and the other activities must work cross functionally for optimal organization performance(Chase et al. 2007).

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.

Describe how Haier uses activity sharing and the transfer of core competencies to create value. (related diversification strategy)

This report represents my individual effort. I did not receive or offer aid to anyone when performing this assignment, nor did I plagiarize any material.

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)

With the idea of activity mapping, Porter (1996) builds on his ideas of generic strategy and the value chain to describe strategy implementation in more detail. Competitive advantage requires that the firm's value chain be managed as a system rather than a collection of separate parts. Positioning choices determine not only which activities a company will perform and how it will configure individual activities, but also how they relate to one another. This is crucial, since the essence of implementing strategy is in the activities - choosing to perform activities differently or to perform different activities than rivals. A firm is more than the sum of its activities. A firm's value chain is an interdependent system or network of activities, connected by linkages. Linkages occur when the way in which one activity is performed affects the cost or effectiveness of other activities. Linkages create tradeoffs requiring optimization and coordination.

In PEST analysis, we will look into what will be affect by the business environment. It includes political environment, economical environment, social environment and technological environment.