TESU BSBA Capstone - Case Study

[Merlin]

To be honest it's still stressing me out a great deal due to taking so long to figure out what some of these questions are asking. For instance I don't quite know what is wanted in terms of a value chain analysis. The book was so vague on that I have little idea how to do one. I don't see how I will have time to study for the midterm and write the final paper in addition to all this other writing. This class is beyond the undergrad level in my opinion. Not everyone wants to prepare to go to graduate school. I just want to finish the bachelor degree but this is taking a toll for sure. If I can't figure this out faster and work faster I don't think I'll make it to the end.

The value chain analysis question threw me for a loop as well, since the process wasn't really documented well (or at all) in the text. That case study took the longest to complete so far, mainly because I had to figure out what it was asking and how to do it. I ended up using some google resources.

For this, what you're basically being asked to do is visually document the value chain of the company, in terms of providing the details that are discussed in figure 4.3 (p. 100) in the text. Basically, it comes down to looking at the company and mapping the various company activities to one of the primary or support activities and then documenting them with a line item.

I found the following in a web search for how to complete a value chain analysis. This is an example of what the finished product of a value chain analysis should look like. I have no idea what company it is for (most likely its made up since it comes from a tutorial). I mainly used this as a reference and modeled mine to resemble this. I did mine in excel though, so no graphics, just text.



You'll note that this version of the value chain uses different names for the activities; this version uses Michael Porter's defaults, but I used the ones from the book instead. The primary activities are exactly the same, they just use different names for the first and third activities. For the support activities what is listed in the book as General Administration should include what is shown in the example under the Infrastructure and Procurement sections.

That should give you a big leg up on this case study. Once I realized that this is what was being asked for, I was able to walk through the case study details for the company as a reference to replace all the activities listed in the example with ones appropriate to the company and complete the value chain analysis in a few hours.

I hope that helps.