Smart & Simple
Today’s dynamic business environments and economic uncertainty mean organisations must work SMARTER to remain competitive and respond to changing customer demands for better and newer products and services at lower costs. For many businesses, a primary barrier to business agility and cost optimisation is IT complexity. In order to achieve business goals and to serve your customer better IT must be able to quickly and easily deliver on the needs of the (changing) needs of the business while supporting innovation.
Community Performance
The current fragmented execution of the required service value chain does not match the changed market needs. Increasingly, businesses will focus less on enterprise performance and more on the performance of the real-time community and the influence of the enterprise on the community. This is the result of outside factors becoming as important to enterprise performance as those inside: the performance of suppliers, channels, services partners, third-party products and others involved in the mentioned supply chain.
Improvements in performance will come from tighter collaboration (read business integration) with key suppliers. One could argue that community performance is not controllable when there is no direct ownership, but as companies like Wal-Mart and others have shown with their supply-chain strategies, direct influence can be even stronger than direct ownership.
Another way to put it: one has to shift from a fragmented happening, leading to undue delays, to a collaborative, action-flow controlled business process, creating business capacities and capabilities, and … eliminating actual business inefficiencies.
Many electronic business applications are failing to meet their business targets because of a lack of integration with back-office systems. These current technical weaknesses are complemented by new technologies that make real-time operation more feasible. They include application integration tools, mobile data services and “always on” Internet access (fixed and mobile).
Total Life Cycle
Taking into account the specifics of the networked economy as well as the stakeholders interests, whilst focusing on the ones of the car manufacturers, one is to consider the total lifecycle of a car – from production till end of use (recycling) – and the related cost of ownership. All considerations ought to be centered around the commitment to quality and customer’s satisfaction. A business model that allows to reduce the cost of ownership over the entire lifecycle of a car would be one of the better answers to the win-win objective, creating value for all stakeholders.
