Chapter 3 : Strategic Initiatives for Implementing Competitive Advantages

Supply Chain Management (SCM) 

Involves the management of information flows between and among stages in a supply chain to maximize total supply chain effectiveness and profitability.

Four basic components of supply chain management include:

1.Supply chain strategy – strategy for managing all resources to meet customer demand

2.Supply chain partner – partners throughout the supply chain that deliver finished products, raw materials, and services.

3.Supply chain operation – schedule for production activities

4.Supply chain logistics – product delivery process

Effective and efficient SCM systems can enable an organization to:

• –Decrease the power of its buyers 
• –Increase its own supplier power 
• –Increase switching costs to reduce the threat of substitute products or services 
• –Create entry barriers thereby reducing the threat of new entrants 
• –Increase efficiencies while seeking a competitive advantage through cost leadership

Customer relationship management (CRM) 

 involves managing all aspects of a customer’s relationship with an organization to increase customer loyalty and retention and an organization's profitability

Many organizations, such as Charles Schwab and Kaiser Permanente, have obtained great success through the implementation of CRM systems

 Business Process Reengineering - BPR

-BPR is like standardized set of activities that accomplish a specific task such as processing a customers order such as McDonalds,Big Apple, and so on.

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) 

Integrates all departments and functions throughout an organization into a single IT system so that employees can make decisions by viewing enterprisewide information on all business operations.Keyword in ERP is “enterprise”