Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Value Chain Management Capstone course. This is the last course in the Value Chain Management Specialization. Value chain in management is very important to the success of a firm. The value chain highlights those key internal activities in which a firm engages in order to create, deliver, and capture value. A firm's performance is impacted by how well these activities are managed. A generic value chain was proposed and introduced by Dr. Michael Porter in 1985. This model decomposed the chain into nine key areas, inbound logistics, outbound logistics, operations, marketing, services, technology development, procurement, human resource management, and infrastructure. Each of these areas embody very critical decisions that a firm has to make. In this course, we will be thinking through different aspects of this model and give you the opportunity to critically think through several issues during our work in this capstone course. In this capstone, we will synthesize and draw heavily upon content from other areas, primarily including marketing management, operations management, process improvement, and managerial accounting. The primary objective is to draw linkages between these areas and overall value chain management. We will utilize a fictitious case to study and introduce realistic scenarios. From these scenarios, you will conduct analysis and make a number of decisions as a firm seeks to better manage its value chain, with the expectation they will support better operational decisions, leading to higher performance and profitability. You will be making a number of decisions regarding key activities conducted by the firm. These decisions will impact the products and service that a firm may offer in the future. Consequently, these decisions will also have a significant impact on overall organization success. So using many other concepts and tools learned and discussed in marketing management, managerial accounting, process improvement, and operations management, this capstone hopes to pull together and unify that content to gain an understanding of how they all may support value change management efforts. We will be analyzing the situations for World Cloud Sensor Computing. WCSC is a leading customized sensor system provider. They are facing a very dynamic environment as a result of changing marketing conditions on both the supply and demand side, changes in buyer's behavior, changes in purchasing patterns, and other dynamics. Based on these dynamics, we will need to make key decisions on value chain activities by understanding and articulating what gives the firm its competitive advantage. We need to consider its products, the cost structure, the man for their products' pricing, human resource, and many other factors. Your goal is to advise the CEO on making key decisions. You need to make strategic decisions on product offerings. Going forward, we will need to consider the needs of many stakeholders, along with many other factors that will be highlighted in the case. To have least objects of the course, we will focus on a few key learning and topical areas, first on building organizational activity map by identifying what are all those activities, the key activities, that WCSC is involved and how do these activities come together to deliver on their value proposition. So we'll build this activities map focusing on their core components of the value proposition, focusing on key activities performed by WCSC, with the hopes of understanding their relationships activities and their impact on the value chain. And once we have a sense of those activities, we can take a more critical review of these activities, consider what may be key cost drivers in order to consider what might be cost-reduction strategies, be able to identify what might be value drivers and how can we create more value for both the firm as well as our customers. We might recognize a need to implement or to add new activities. For example, we could find activities that are missing, or there might be misalignments between activities in our overall strategy. And by understanding the impact of the value chain on competitive advantage, we hope to understand how that impacts our products offerings as well as on overall product performance and organization performance and profitability. And given all the moving parts in value chain, it is important to critically consider the impact of several organizations' decisions on value chain management within a business environment governed by many challenges and constraints. So the next steps is to please read through the case and think about the issues and complete assignment one. Think about the impact of these issues identifying the case and how they may pertain to accounting, marketing, process improvement, and operations and be sure to check the course site for more details on the assignment. My hope for this capstone is that you'll have the opportunity to practice and utilize the skills you have gained in accounting, marketing, operations, process improvement, as well as any life experiences and that you'll also learn something new and have a wonderful experience in the course. Thank you so much for attending.
