Answer: 1) Carol can use the surve results to . identify the building blocks of competitive advantage and develop strategies to use them to increase profitability and in this way try to get the most out of it.
2) Strategically, managers who have identified these advanced factors should <u>take steps to protect these assets, either formally or as a trade secret, optimize the company's use of them and not outsource them to other firms </u>because it is convenient to try that the competition does not find out about the use of this factor of production so that it cannot imitate them and thus be able to gain a greater market share to the competition.
3) The statement "in response to requests from customers for healthier food on the menu, a restaurant tweaks its recipe for its most popular sandwich to remove processed ingredients and replace them with fresh vegetables." describes a strategy that adds value to multiple factors as it goes through several activities in the value chain because the company's decision to use less processed ingredients and more fresh vegetables not only facilitates production but also responds to a customer need, which will value the products even more.
Answer:
Event Dimension BP stock prices falling 25% during the first month after the oil spill. <u>ECONOMIC. </u>
The Economic dimension of the environment deals with production in the economy which means that it deals with business entities and the financial system. Dimension BP stock price falling therefore falls under her.
Using deep-se submersibles to take pictures of the oil leak a mile below the surface of the water. <u>TECHNOLOGICAL. </u>
The Technological dimension of the environment refers to anything related to the use of technology and using deep-sea submersibles to take pictures of the leak below the surface of the water will definitely fall under technology.
People moving from Louisiana to Oklahoma to avoid the effects of the spill. <u>SOCIOCULTURAL. </u>
Sociocultural dimension deals with human beings and how they relate with themselves and the environment around them. People therefore moving from Louisiana to Oklahoma will fall under here.
Answer:
Industrial supply company scenario:
- The company wants to create a data warehouse where management can obtain a single corporate-wide view of critical sales information to identify best-selling products in specific geographic areas, key customers, and sales trends.
- The sales and product information are stored in both a divisional sales system running on a Unix server and a corporate sales system running on an IBM mainframe.
- The desire is to create a single standard format that consolidates these data from both systems.
Business problems:
- A business problem that can arise from not having these data in a single standard format is that employees will see the data as inconsistent.
- It is difficult to make business decisions if the data is unreliable, inaccurate, or redundant.
- The product descriptions are formatted differently so managers and employees might get confused when it is entered into the system.
- Also, the system identifies the sales by territory in the United States so it would be impossible to identify the sales or even around the world.
- The corporate sales system also lacks a way to identify the identification of the customer.
- Both sales system should be consistent with the information in order to prevent redundancies or inaccuracies.
How easy it would be to create a database with a single standard format:
- Creating a database with a single standard format would ideally be easy.
- Data quality audits and data cleansing should be performed when constructing the new database.
- Data quality audits and data cleansing would correct any redundancies and inaccuracies in the current systems.
- By using data-cleansing software, the company can combine and integrate the data from all the systems into a single standard format that is uniform throughout the whole company.
Problems that should be addressed:
- A problem that should be addressed is the product description and sales territory tags.
- These tags have different formats which could lead to inconsistencies in the data.
- The names would have to be changed so that they are the same format and are only entered once in the new single standard format database.
- Another problem that would have to be addressed is keeping both the division and customer id tags in the new database.
- This would provide more information for each entry and would limit any confusion among the employees.
Database specialists:
- Database specialists will help solve the problems by performing the data quality audits and data cleansing.
- They will also help in establishing an information policy and developing the new database.
- They are also responsible for the specific policies and procedures through which data can be managed as an organizational resource.
- This involves overseeing logical database design and data dictionary development, planning for data, and monitoring how information systems specialists and end-user groups use data.
General business managers:
- General business managers would have the final say when managing data resources.
- They would be responsible for defining and organizing the structure and content of the database and maintaining the database.
Who should have the authority?
- The general business managers should have the authority because they are responsible for the data.
- This would mean that even though they allow database specialists to establish an information policy and develop the new database, the managers are the ones who have to approve the final product in order for it to be implemented company-wide.
- The managers are the ones whose reputations are on the line when a company succeeds or fails, so they should have the final authority.
