Business Transformation for Competitive Advantage

A successful organisation will have many different goals & objectives that it will want to try and achieve. In order to meet these goals & objectives an organisation will undertake a number of business processes and develop various competitive advantages. To assess how effective its business processes are, an organisation can use Michael Porter's value chain approach. Value chain analysis can help an organisation understand how it add value to its existing business processes and increase the value the customer places on their products and services. The relationship between an organisation's business processes and the value chains they create can play an vital role in achieving their goals.

If an organisation wants to be successful and make a profit it will need to develop effective business processes that will not only provide a competitive advantage but also allow them to add value to their products or services for their customers. A business process is a standardised set of activities that accomplish a specific task (Baltzan et. all 2009). Ensuring the effectiveness of the organisation's business processes will grant them a competitive advantage over their pre existing competitors and the possible threat of any new entrants or substitutes. A competitive advantage is a product or service that an organisation's customers place a greater value on than similar offerings from a competitor (Baltzan et. all 2009). Gaining a competitive advantage will allow an organisation to become more profitable as customers will begin differentiate them against their competitors and place a great deal of value on what they offer. Michael Porter's value chain approach views an organisation as a series of processes, each of which adds value to the product or service for each customer (Baltzan et. all 2009). Viewing an organisation though a value chain will allow the organisation to identify the key processes that specifically add value to customers and coming up systems to support those processes. Through the value chain approach organisations are able to find ways to improve their business processes and