Fedex's Business Strategy

1. Historically how has IT played a central role in FedEx's business strategy and helped them achieve competitive advantage?

FedEx used IT to help supporting its business strategy and achieve competitive advantage by offering value-added service, create switching cost, and reduce company labor cost.

Value-added

FedEx offered value-added service to customer. By being the first company that pioneers COSMOS the barcoding system to scan at each stage of delivery cycle, FexEx could tell location of the package. Digitally Assisted Dispatch System (DADS) was used within FedEx in order to co-ordinated on call pickups for customers with the couriers to manage their time and routes through communication via computer in their vans so the customers would be able to receive their parcels on time. Then FedEx used PowerShip as a program to facilitate customer-ordering process by storing of frequently used address, label printing, on-line package pick up request, and including package tracking which enabled the ability to serve customers who ship more than 100 packages per day. In addition to this, they also relaunched PowerShip 3 in year 1993, a client-server shipping system for customers who ship three or more packages per day. Especially in 1994, FedEx was the first to launch FedEx Website that offer on-line package status tracking so that customers can actually conduct business via the Internet so that its customer could log into the website to track and trace the order anywhere in the world. And in 1999 FedEx developed software with Netscape, Application Programming Interface (API), a link that allow customers to track package in their own site which allowed customers to access the shipping information across the supply chain in real-time data, from manufacturing to customer service to invoicing. Lastly, by using EDI technology along with the utilization of the Internet, FedEx