Articles for Value Chain Group

Rise in R&D expenditures now matches sales growth. North American headquartered companies led the way with a 13% increase; India & China are rapidly boosting their R&D investment, but their share of total spending remains small. Customer focus yields performance gains. NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Booz Allen Hamilton's (www.boozallen.com) third annual analysis of the world's 1,000 largest corporate R&D spenders, released today, finds that these corporations increased their R&D ...

Interoperability and choice are key factors driving strong Open XML adoption in Europe and the U.S. REDMOND, Wash., Aug. 27 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- IT managers at large organizations are increasingly interested in employing XML-based standards, including Open XML, among their document standards, according to a study of U.S. and European organizations commissioned by Microsoft Corp. The results of the survey, which polled 200 government and private-sector organizations to better ...

Experts agree that business process management (BPM) is a good practice, but say it can be tough to make happen if the people within your organization are more data-focused than process-focused. Read more......

This week we want to focus on one single aspect of Business Process Management - what skills are required of Project Managers responsible for managing a Business Process Redesign Project. Specifically, we want to focus on what's required to assure that a Business Process Redesign project progresses smoothly and achieves its objectives. First of all, we need to distinguish between improvement projects and redesign projects. Improvement projects are undertaken to make an existing process ...

BPM Methodologies and Process Maturity A business process methodology is a formal description of a procedure that a team can follow to redesign or improve a business process. Some prefer to describe such a procedure as a "framework" to suggest that it provides an overall description of how to proceed, but avoids being too prescriptive. Since we tend to use the term "framework" to refer to a template ...

In this thought provoking article, Andrew Feller, Dan Shunk, and Tom Callarman consider the nature of value chains and supply chains and discuss how companies can synchronize the two to optimize business performance. Download PDF

Federation is the logical goal of identity infrastructures, but achieving it takes more than just technology March 24, 2006 For years, companies have kept stores of identity information about employees, customers, and partners. These databases and directories are critical components of a company's identity infrastructure. But as businesses push to create new products and increase productivity, they have discovered that they often must cooperate to provide the services their customers and ...

Supply chains are going global, yet most firms' systems are designed solely for domestic orders. It's been a difficult time for Larry Merritt, director of global logistics at Lexington Home Brands, in Lexington, N.C. In less than three years, the $167 million home furnishings company has completely changed its business model. "We've gone from being a manufacturer to being an importer," Merritt says. The reason? Globalization. Read more here.

FERA - Federated Enterprise Reference Architecture™ A framework fails if it does not address the full scope of the challenge – the extended design and supply chain. Individual companies no longer define the primary competitive criteria for success. Programs that narrowly target an OEM often fail because that OEM alone represents less than half of the scope of issues that must be addressed. Rather, factors in the full supply chain represent the major determinant of success. To ...

Hello, Welcome to the Value Chain Group newsletter. This month we review the research programs underway validating the Value Chain Operations Reference (VCOR) model. We highlight the Metrics Classification research program at Arizona State University, and update you on the Federated Enterprise Reference Architechecture (FERA) progress and the Integrated Process and Technology Framework (IPTF) formulation. We hope you find this newsletter ...

In a report to be presented at the World Bank today, a group that includes senior government officials from 13 countries will urge nations to adopt open-information technology standards as a vital step to accelerate economic growth, efficiency and innovation. The 33-page report is a road map for creating national policies on open technology standards, and comes at a time when several countries - and some state governments - are pursuing plans to reduce their dependence on proprietary ...

In practice, many firms plan and execute supply and demand activities separately (Lapide 1998, Vokurka and Lummus 1998). The gap that exists between these two areas limits the potential for competitive advantage in the marketplace. In addition, as companies increasingly outsource functions to focus on core competencies, access to resources from trading partners to accomplish goals becomes more important. As firms recognize that competition is no longer limited to company versus company, but ...

The Paper opens by mapping the changes in the global auto industry in the 1990's showing how the rapid growth in sales and production between 1990 and 1997 came largely from the emerging markets rather than the triad regions (North America, the European Union and Japan). However, for some of these markets the downturn that followed was substantial and prolonged. More

Charles Poirier developed the five levels based on his experience as the head of manufacturing for a packaging company and his work as a partner in CSC's supply chain practice. According to Poirier, each company has to go through these levels as the supply chain progresses: Level 0 Pre Supply Chain – Continuous Improvement – Bring Forward the Good Practices: focuses upon the findings of the organization's previous efforts of improvement. Level 1 Internal/Functional: is ...

Because of its resource and labour intensity, the wood furniture sector presents an opportunity for developing countries and their firms to participate effectively in the global economy. This paper begins with a brief description of the global wood furniture industry and highlights the importance of exports wood furniture products for developing countries and emergin and transitional economies. The paper then maps the wood furniture value chain ...More

The paper uses the global value chain framework to explain the transformations in production, trade and corporate strategies that altered the apparel industry over the past decades and changed the conditions for innovation and learning in the industry. The apparel industy is identified as a buyer-driven value chain...More

Rapid technological advancements make fragmenting of activies in all stages of a production value chain increasingly possible. Some segmented activies can be performed in differenct locations worldwide and reintegrated again into global value chains and global producxtion networks. The paper examines how the spreading of these production systems can create opportunities ... More

Hello ________, Thank you for your interest in the Value Chain Group. In this issue, the Value Chain Group highlights the two environments that enable effective collaboration to continually evolve the value chain framework for the next generation of Business Process Management. Contact Us We hope you find this newsletter informative and welcome your comments. The Value Chain Operations Reference (VCOR) ...

A Closer Look into Frameworks and Reference Models Greg Peck Dr. Robert Beam Value Chain Associates Professor of Economics Cincinnati, Ohio University of Wisconsin at Superior Read a edited version of this article at BPTrends here In an earlier publication ...

The value chain is a concept which could provide a meeting ground for economics,business administration and industrial sociology in the study of one important aspect of globalisation, namely the simultaneous economic integration of countries and disintegration of production processes. Most research on value chains so far has been done by non-economists. This note, by contrast, looks at value chains from the perspective of economics. It starts by reviewing what economists can learn from ...