[SOUND] Hi everyone, welcome back to the Value Chain Management Capstone course. Thank you all so much for being a part of this course. Hopefully you have found the course helpful, you learned something new. And hopefully your thinking about the concepts we've covered has been expanded. With this being the capstone course, the main objective was to synthesis the content from the course you had taken. In order to gain a holistic view of how the inputs from marketing, accounting, process improvement and operations are critical in value chain management decisions. In more general, I was hoping that we could start to view the value chain as a source of competitive advantage. As a competitive advantage, it creates value for the end user and the firm that is difficult to duplicate. Meaning that there is hidden and indirect impacts that are not easily codified. It is hopefully costly to imitate by your competitors. We tried to support these learning objectives through the WCSC case study. WCSC was facing a changing market environment. Management needed to plot a path forward that would remain true to their company's core values. But would allow them to successfully pursue both short term and long term goals from both 2014 and beyond. They need to maintain profitability in the short run, but to keep a focus on their strategic intent. So at the center of value chain analysis is effective use of resources. So how should a company or organization successfully manage those resources. In one approach that seems to give you a glimpse into the use of the resources, is analysis for WCSCs portfolio of offerings. In considering this portfolio, we need to consider both qualitative as well as quantitative factors that supports WCSC's ability to create value by providing a unique solution to the customer's problem. By delivering value, by mobilizing resources to provide a solution, and by capturing value by having internal processes that manage costs and allows the firms to be financially stable and profitable. And there are many approaches to how you might have proceeded with your analysis. And you should definitely try multiple approaches just to make sure that does any of those approaches lead to any types of decisions that are different or do they all have similar outcomes? However, one of the most critical considerations is ensuring some level of equivalent comparison. And so you want to make sure that in your weighting or the way you're doing the analysis, you're not biasing any of that information. So in starting this case, we considered the activity map as a beginning point. So we mapped out the flows and relationships among the activities carried out by WCSC And in this case, we were hoping to expand beyond the silo approach to managing WCSC's resources. And move more toward a view of how all of these elements and all these silos of functional areas, fit together. In practice, sometimes this is difficult. There may be several skills or expertise gaps in the required knowledge. So it's not so much that everyone has to be an expert at everything. But hopefully within your organization you can start to embrace this type of systems thinking. And consider the cause and effect of decisions along the value chain. So in this case, allow the market expert to be the market expert, the production expert to be the production expert, technology expert, likewise. The hope is to use the value chain management concept as a unifying framework. And to seek to address those questions that cut across all functions. And some of the core questions, for example, is considering the value proposition. What is this uniqueness about the organization that allows you to deliver value, capture value that's different from our competitors. And so what is at the core, in the case of WCSC, we saw that customer care, customization, innovation and several others. At the core of what they believed were their key elements or key proposition they provide to their end user. Then you want to look at what activity support this value proposition. And are we unique? Do we differentiate? For example in the case of WCSC they will sometimes purchase some of their customer products. And integrate their systems into those products and use it as a marketing tool. So the key question would be, is this an effective use of resources? Value chain is at the heart of effective use of resources. So are we gaining back from our dispention of those resources, and the use of those resources? Are we receiving a return on that investment? In addition, there are costs associated with each of these activities. Are we creating a benefit with each of those activities from a cost perspective? And how to we compare to competitors in the industry? In this case, I didn't provide significant detail on the competitors. But in practice, you can maybe acquire this data and discuss, as we discussed earlier, and then access the strength and weaknesses and compare those kinds of factors to your organization. So this list of questions is very limited, but you'll have a better understanding of what questions, based on the industry that you might practice in. So I hope that many of the things you have learned and we've discussed within this capstone brings you great benefit both now and in your future endeavors. Thank you for your time. [NOISE]
