Competitive Advantage Of The American Business Environment

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.

Conducting a value chain analysis provides a snapshot for identifying a firm’s relative competitive performance, core competencies, and for focusing on customer centric activities. Costco’s customer driven focus allows primary and support business activities to work in unity creating a stronger competitive advantage and thereby increasing profitability. Profitability and shareholder value rely on coordination of both sets of business activities to create a firm’s competitive advantage.

Value Chain analysis evaluates each step business goes through from inception to finality. The goal is to maximize the value for the total cost. Costco's mission is to provide their members with quality goods and services at the lowest possible prices. The company’s mission, values and strategies suggest Costco uses a broad enterprise strategy which fits in the societal framework. To ensure employee motivation, Costco offers them a unique banquet of benefits. This include; paying health benefits for them, 50% higher wage, employee retention of over 90 percent, and maintaining employees even during recession periods (Costco, 2010). The Company’s strength is its primary value chains which split into two distinct functions: Demand fulfilment and Demand generation. Demand fulfilment includes input logistics, operations, and output logistics. Demand generation involves sales, marketing, and service department which breaks down into sub-tiers. Costco’s support activities include HRM, technology development, firm infrastructure and procurement. Costco’s weaknesses are difficult to pinpoint; one weakness is persistent low operating profit margins. Bigger profits can occur by not paying employee benefits and with demanding higher returns from their suppliers. The problem would be at what cost?  Costco receives cost advantages from value adding major (brand items) activities. However, it continues to experience a challenge

Customer-centric businesses focus on consistently delivering a differentiated experience designed to satisfy the customer. The ultimate goal is to sustain competitive advantage in the marketplace. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate why an effective value chain creates competitive advantage.

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).

Successful organizations remain profitable and competitive when achieving customer delight is their overall objective. Designing and implementing an effective value chain is the key to success. When competitive advantage is tied to customer delight then an organization will see growth and profitability. In this paper the interwoven relationship between effective value chain management, profitability, competitive advantage and customer delight will be outlined. All firms make decisions that affect their competitive position and profitability. Strategic planning is the organizational process of making these important decisions. It is undertaken in an

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)

To further appreciate the concept of value creation it’s imperative to recognize that “everything culminates into the customer experience” (Rustogi, 2015a). Customer service is not the only component of value creation, the way in which a product is advertised, packaged, and presented along with the features, ease of use, and reliability of the product or service all encompass the customer experience. As such, it is extremely important for companies to incorporate each of the above components into their strategy when deciding on what product or service to provide. A majority of companies overlook the value that goods and services afford customers and will manufacture items the company thinks the customer wants.

In his value chain examination, Michael Porter distinguished five essential quality producing ventures in ordinary business operations. They are: “inbound logistics, operations, outbound logistics, marketing and sales and service.” (Porter, et al 2010) Porter 's emphasis point in the worth chain portrayal is that organizations can produce the best overall revenues by accentuating client appreciation in each of these stages. Ideal client appreciation, and in this way maximum net revenues, result from a mix of either ease

Marketing, R&D, manufacturing, and other activities comprise a firm’s value chain; firms configure activities to create superior customer value on a global basis.

Now a day, many companies are trying to improve their value chain in order to use the value chain as a strategy in the manner of meeting the customers need and satisfaction. One of the strategies they are using with value chain is to gain competitive advantages for rival among their competitors. Value chain actually can discover and fulfil what customers want and the identification of customer needs will hence become one of the ways to surpass their competitors in term of competitive advantages. Customers can have the best satisfaction of the things that they really want, at an acceptable price level. In other words, a company overall competitive advantage derives from the difference between

Starting a business implies to perform value-creating activities. All these activities are connected to the different stakeholders, such as suppliers, consumers or even marketing channels. Michael Porter defined the value chain as a combination of all support and primary activities that take part into the creation of the product or service. (See appendix to have a deeper description of all the activities). Creating value comes with the discovery of an opportunity and the exploitation of it. Michael Porter “created value chain analysis as a means to organize and understand the customer-value-creating activities and processes within a company” (Price, 2011). The company focuses on its internal business activities that affect its costs and that

Value chain is a part of the company’s core competences which plays a very important part to get competitive advantage on its competitors. A value chain is a whole series of activities that create value or add value to the end product. The total value delivered by the company is the sum of the total value built up all throughout the company. Michael porter developed this concept in his 1980 book ‘competitive advantage.

Value chain analysis is a capable instrument for the organization to distinguish its important actions as having the capacity to finish competitive need and make predominant routines. The value chain has been utilized as an intense tool for management as it comprises of the various activity the company uses to produce value and its profit. (Edwards, 2002)