Value Chain Analysis – Porter’s Value Chain

The concept of Value Chain  was propagated by Michael Porter  in the 1980s  in  his  book  “Competitive  Advantage:  Creating  and  Sustaining Superior Performance” (Porter, 1985),  as a tool of analyzing the firm’s internal environment and resource base. Value Chain Analysis  is an analytical tool that describes all activities that make up the economic performance and capabilities of the firm, used to analyze and examine activities that create value for a given firm. A firm can be conceived of an aggregation of discrete activities and the competitive edge arises based on how a firm performs these activities better than its competitors. The cluster of these activities is called the value chain. According to Porter:  “Competitive advantage cannot be understood by looking at a firm as a whole. It stems from the many discrete activities a firm performs in designing, producing, marketing, delivering and supporting its product. Each of these activities can Continue reading

Merchant Banking Services: Management of Capital Issues

The capital issue are managed are category-1 merchant banker and constitutes the most important aspects of their services. The public issue of corporate securities involves marketing of capital issues of new and existing companies, additional issues of existing companies including rights issue and dilution of shares by letter of offer. The public issues are managed by the involvement of various agencies i.e. underwriters, brokers, bankers, advertising agency, printers, auditors, legal advisers, registrar to the issue and merchant bankers providing specialized services to make the issue of the success. However merchant banker is the agency at the apex level than that plan, coordinate and control the entire issue activity and direct different agencies to contribute to the successful marketing of securities. The procedure of the managing a public issue by a merchant banker is divided into two phases, viz; Pre-issue management Post-issue management Pre-Issue Management: Steps required to be taken to Continue reading

Concept of Resource Based View (RBV)

The resource based view is defined as a business management tool utilized to know the strategic resources available to firm. The basic principle of the resource based value is that the basis for a competitive advantage of a company lies primarily in the application of the group of valuable resources at the firm’s disposal. In order to change a short-run competitive advantage into a maintained competitive advantage requires that these resources are heterogeneous in nature and not perfectly mobile. In other words, this will change into valuable resources that either perfectly imitable or substitutable without great effort. If these conditions are remained, the company’s group of resources can help the firm sustaining above average returns. The recent dominant view of corporate strategy   – Resource Based Theory or Resource Based View (RBV) of company – is based on the theory of economic rent and the view of the company as Continue reading

Features of Goods and Services Tax (GST)

Goods and Services Tax (GST) is consumption tax that charged the buyers to pay for a wide range of domestic & international products, goods and services. In some countries it is also called Value Added Tax. It is a multi-stage tax on domestic consumption levied on taxable supplies of goods and services. GST imposed on every level of a product from raw materials all the way to finished goods. Consumers still need to pay income tax as GST and income tax is totally different. It is a consumption tax charged on imports items and also value added to goods and services provided by a business to the end user. Goods And Services Tax will be borne by the end-user or consumer and is not intended to add burden to businesses. Benefits of  Goods and Services Tax (GST) Eliminates cascading effects Goods and Services Tax (GST)  also enable the minimization of Continue reading

Production Planning and Control

Planning and control are interrelated and interdependent.   Planning is meaningless unless control action is taken to ensure the success of the plan.   Control also provides information feedback which is helpful in modifying the existing plans and in making new plans.   Similarly, control is dependent on planning as the standards of performance are laid down under planning.   Therefore, production and control should be considered an integrated function of planning to ensure the most efficient production and regulation of operations to execute the plans successfully. Production planning and control may be defined as the direction and coordination of the firm’s material and physical facilities towards the attainment of pre-specified production goals in the most efficient available way. It is the process of planning production in advance of operations, establishing the exact route of each individual item, part or assembly, setting starting and finishing dates for each important item Continue reading

Charactristics of Business Information

Information is a fact, datum, observation perception or any other thing that adds to knowledge. In the words of Gordon B. Davis “Information is data that has been processed into a form that is meaningful to the recipient and is of real or perceived value in current or prospective decisions”. Information is obtained either by direct observation or by communication. Most of business information is obtained through communication. Even in the simplest responsibility center, the manager could not observe with his own senses everything that is going on, nor would he want to devote his time to doing so, even if it were possible. Instead, the manager relies on information that is communicated to him in various ways, ranging from informal conversations to formal reports. The characteristics of information used in business systems are: Purpose:   Information must have purpose at the time it is transmitted, otherwise it is simply Continue reading