การวิเคราะห์ห่วงโซ่คุณค่า
ความหมายของห่วงโซ่คุณค่า (Value Chain)
ห่วงโซ่คุณค่า เป็นชุดของกิจกรรมทุกขั้นตอนที่สร้างคุณค่า
คุณค่ารวมของบริษัท เป็นผลรวมของคุณค่าที่สร้างขึ้นทั้งหมดทั่วทั้งบริษัท
Michael Porter ได้พัฒนาแนวคิดนี้ในทศวรรษที่ 1980 จากหนังสือของเขาเรื่อง ความได้เปรียบในการแข่งขัน (Competitive Advantage)
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Porter กำหนดห่วงโซ่คุณค่าที่ประกอบด้วย กิจกรรมหลัก (primary activities) และกิจกรรมสนับสนุน (support activities)
กิจกรรมหลักเกี่ยวข้องกับ การขนส่งขาเข้า (inbound logistics การได้รับวัสดุที่ใช้ในการเพิ่มมูลค่า) การดำเนินงาน (operations กระบวนการทั้งหมดในการผลิต) การขนส่งขาออก (outbound การกระจายไปยังจุดของการขาย) การตลาดและการขาย (marketing and sales การขาย ตราสินค้า และการส่งเสริม) และการบริการ (service บริการหลังการขายผลิตภัณฑ์)
A value chain is the whole series of activities that create and build value at every step.
The total value delivered by the company is the sum total of the value built up all throughout the company.
Michael Porter developed this concept in his 1980 book 'Competitive Advantage'.
Value chain analysis relies on the basic economic principle of advantage — companies are best served by operating in sectors where they have a relative productive advantage compared to their competitors.
How do you change business inputs into business outputs in such a way that they have a greater value than the original cost of creating those outputs?
The value that's created and captured by a company is the profit margin:
Value Created and Captured – Cost of Creating that Value = Margin
The more value an organization creates, the more profitable it is likely to be. And when you provide more value to your customers, you build competitive advantage.
A value chain is the whole series of activities that create and build value at every step.
The total value delivered by the company is the sum total of the value built up all throughout the company.
Michael Porter developed this concept in his 1980 book 'Competitive Advantage'.
Porter defines the value chain as made of primary activities and support activities.
Primary involves inbound logistics (getting the material in for adding value by processing it), operations (which are all the processes within the manufacturing), outbound (which involves distribution to the points of sale), marketing and sales (which go sell it, brand it and promote it) and service (which maintains the functionality of the product, post sales).
The support functions which feed into all the primary functions are the firm infrastructure, like Management Infrastructure which allows managers to monitor the environment well; Human Resource, which develops the skills needed to steer the company well; procurement to buy/ source goods at the right price, which increasingly takes importance because of difficult economic conditions and technology, which could give the firm speed, accuracy and quality.
Porter suggests that activities within an organization add value to the service and products that the company produces, and that all of these activities should be run at optimum level if the organization is to gain any real competitive advantage.
If they are run efficiently, the value obtained should exceed the costs of running them — for example, customers should return to the company and transact freely and willingly.
Value chain analysis relies on the basic economic principle of advantage — companies are best served by operating in sectors where they have a relative productive advantage compared to their competitors.
Simultaneously, companies should ask themselves where they can deliver the best value to their customers.
To conduct a value chain analysis, the company begins by identifying each part of its production process and identifying where steps can be eliminated or improvements can be made.
These improvements can result in either cost savings or improved productive capacity.
The end result is that customers derive the most benefit from the product for the cheapest cost, which improves the company's bottom line in the long run.
Its goal is to recognize, which activities are the most valuable (i.e. are the source of cost or differentiation advantage) to the firm and which ones could be improved to provide competitive advantage.
The firm that competes through differentiation advantage will try to perform its activities better than competitors would do.
If it competes through cost advantage, it will try to perform internal activities at lower costs than competitors would do. When a company is capable of producing goods at lower costs than the market price or to provide superior products, it earns profits.
To gain cost advantage a firm has to go through 5 analysis steps:
Step 1. Identify the firm’s primary and support activities.
Step 2. Establish the relative importance of each activity in the total cost of the product.
Step 3. Identify cost drivers for each activity.
Step 4. Identify links between activities.
Step 5. Identify opportunities for reducing costs.
All the activities (from receiving and storing materials to marketing, selling and after sales support) that are undertaken to produce goods or services have to be clearly identified and separated from each other.
This requires an adequate knowledge of company’s operations because value chain activities are not organized in the same way as the company itself.
The managers who identify value chain activities have to look into how work is done to deliver customer value.
The total costs of producing a product or service must be broken down and assigned to each activity.
Activity based costing is used to calculate costs for each process.
Activities that are the major sources of cost or done inefficiently (when benchmarked against competitors) must be addressed first.
Only by understanding what factors drive the costs, managers can focus on improving them.
Costs for labor-intensive activities will be driven by work hours, work speed, wage rate, etc.
Different activities will have different cost drivers.
Reduction of costs in one activity may lead to further cost reductions in subsequent activities.
For example, fewer components in the product design may lead to less faulty parts and lower service costs. Therefore identifying the links between activities will lead to better understanding how cost improvements would affect he whole value chain.
Sometimes, cost reductions in one activity lead to higher costs for other activities.
When the company knows its inefficient activities and cost drivers, it can plan on how to improve them.
Too high wage rates can be dealt with by increasing production speed, outsourcing jobs to low wage countries or installing more automated processes.
Value Chain Analysis is done differently when a firm competes on differentiation rather than costs. This is because the source of differentiation advantage comes from creating superior products, adding more features and satisfying varying customer needs, which results in higher cost structure.
Step 1. Identify the customers’ value-creating activities.
Step 2. Evaluate the differentiation strategies for improving customer value.
Step 3. Identify the best sustainable differentiation.
After identifying all value chain activities, managers have to focus on those activities that contribute the most to creating customer value.
For example, Apple products’ success mainly comes not from great product features (other companies have high-quality offerings too) but from successful marketing activities.
Managers can use the following strategies to increase product differentiation and customer value:
Add more product features;
Focus on customer service and responsiveness;
Increase customization;
Offer complementary products.
Usually, superior differentiation and customer value will be the result of many interrelated activities and strategies used.
The best combination of them should be used to pursue sustainable differentiation advantage.
The value chain concept separates useful activities (which allow the company as a whole to gain competitive advantage) from the wasteful activities (which hinder the company from getting a lead in the market).
For example, the ability to charge higher prices; lower cost of manufacture; better brand image, faster response to threats or opportunities.
Focusing on the value-creating activities could give the company many advantages.