CHAPTER 3 : Strategic Initiative for Implementing
                          Competitive Advantage

 Strategic Initiatives

- Supply chain management (SCM)
- Customer relationship management (CRM)
- Business process re engineering (BPR)
- Enterprise resource planning (ERP)

 Supply Chain Management - 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 - managing all resources to meet customer demand
2. Supply chain partner - partners throughout the supply chain that deliver finished product,        
                                            raw materials, and services 
3. Supply chain operation - schedule for production activities
4. Supply chain logistic - 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 product 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.

-CRM is not just technology, but strategy process, and business goal that an organization must embrace  on an enterprise wide level.

CRM can enable an organization to :

- Identify types of customer
- Design individual customer marketing campaigns
- Treat each customer as an individual
- Understand customer buying behaviors 

Business process - a standardized set of activities that accomplish a specific task, such as processing
                                a customer's order.

Business process re engineering (BPR) - the analysis and redesign of workflow within and between
                                                                     enterprise.

Finding Opportunity using BPR

-  A company can improve the way it travels the road by moving from foot to horse and then  horse to
   car.
- BPR looks at taking a different path, such as an airplane which ignore the road completely
- Types of change an organization can achieved, along with the magnitudes of change and the
   potential business benefit.

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) - integrates all departments and functions throughout an organization into a single IT system so that viewing enterprisewide information on all business operations.

- Keyword in ERP is "enterprise"
- ERP system collect data from across an organization and correlates the data generating an
  enterprisewide view.