Ecco's global value chain management

3. What does your strategic group map of this industry look like? How attractively is Netflix positioned on the map? Why?

If a company decides to help differentiate its branded footwear by offering buyers 500 models/styles to choose from, then company managers should evaluate the merits of trying to reduce the $14 million annual costs for production run setup costs associated with producing 500 models/styles at each plant by

To develop the innovative and high-quality products required by their customers, Patagonia succeeded in a third strategic area, specifically quality control. Despite being a huge cost for Patagonia, quality control was necessary to enable them to deliver on the two aforementioned strategic goals. To obtain a high level of quality, Patagonia developed long term relationships with reliable vendors for production of goods and procurement of materials, which resulted in a drastically lower defect rate than competitors

Country road has always been one of Australia leading premium stockists of apparel and home wares. Country Road began as a small manufacturer but expanded and diversified to become a leading wholesaler/retailer of apparel and home wares in the Australian market. The great success of this fueled the company into an expansionary strategy into the lucrative yet highly competitive US markets and also further along the way into the Asian markets. The strategy of international expansion into Asia had involved alternative strategies instead of the aggressive strategy into US. Such strategies included strategic partnerships and franchising agreements. Country Road was successful at first with its defined higher quality products and

The objective of these establishments, apart from achieving labor cost savings, was to spread risk. Initially, the various production sites were capable of producing the same types of shoes, indicating an insignificant degree of specialization in the production units. However, in recent years ECCO had strived to narrow each unit and capitalize on its core competencies.

Profitability. The company strategy is to target only 25-45 years for specialist sportswear products, but a lot of

Westminster Company is a giant Global manufacturer of health products whose brand has been recognized by the world. As the company they have three different operations which produce and distribute different product lines. Their main strategy on which they are working and which is a major success for them is decentralized management. Now they are re-evaluating their traditional supply chain strategy because the company is getting too much pressure from their large domestic’s customers and global customers. Now the company has to study on

Much of the company’s success has been attributed to its superior customer service, along with low process and a broad selection of products.

The purpose of this paper is to do a value chain analysis of Costco, identify their resources and capabilities, to conduct a SWOT analysis to identify the opportunities in which they are lagging and to form a strategy to move forward using the recourses and capabilities in the direction of utilizing those opportunities.

With revenue from Crocs shoe sales reaching to $680 million in 2007, it is clear that the company has developed a successful strategy. Not all of the success can be contributed to the design of the product. Although their products were in high demand, there are more underlying factors that have paved the way for Crocs to be competitive in the shoe market. Crocs’ supply chain design and use of vertical integration revolutionized speed and quality of order fulfillment.

Value Chain analysis evaluates each step business goes through from inception to finality. The goal is to maximize the value for the total cost. Costco's mission is to provide their members with quality goods and services at the lowest possible prices. The company’s mission, values and strategies suggest Costco uses a broad enterprise strategy which fits in the societal framework. To ensure employee motivation, Costco offers them a unique banquet of benefits. This include; paying health benefits for them, 50% higher wage, employee retention of over 90 percent, and maintaining employees even during recession periods (Costco, 2010). The Company’s strength is its primary value chains which split into two distinct functions: Demand fulfilment and Demand generation. Demand fulfilment includes input logistics, operations, and output logistics. Demand generation involves sales, marketing, and service department which breaks down into sub-tiers. Costco’s support activities include HRM, technology development, firm infrastructure and procurement. Costco’s weaknesses are difficult to pinpoint; one weakness is persistent low operating profit margins. Bigger profits can occur by not paying employee benefits and with demanding higher returns from their suppliers. The problem would be at what cost?  Costco receives cost advantages from value adding major (brand items) activities. However, it continues to experience a challenge

* Continued investing in TQM quality control to reduce manufacturing costs of Extreme Kicks’ footwear.

1. Study the networked supply chain concept as implemented by Cisco. What are its strengths and weaknesses?

Differentiation was achieved by creating a completely new type of fashionable and functional shoe that was extremely comfortable to wear and fun because of its bright colors. in addition, because of Crocs’ innovative inventory replenishment system, which allowed retailers to order what they needed and get new stock in a couple of weeks, retailers did not need to

• Focus on growing core brands across categories, reaching out to new geographies, within and outside India, and improve operational efficiencies by leveraging technology.