Value Chain for Competitive Advantage

Corporate and operational managers strive to create more value by optimizing the supply-chain activities. Optimization of supply chain activities means competition from other firms, primarily on cost-efficiency. However, optimization of supply chain activities alone cannot always yield a source of competitive advantage. This is for the simple reason that value chain not only seeks to do away with the activities that do not add value, but establishes the importance of other support activities, including infrastructure, technology, and so on, that play a vital role in providing the foundation for competitive advantage. Value chain's primary activities are similar to the primary functions of the supply chain. Where supply chain focuses on efficiency of every function, value chain focuses on the functions that are critical to be effective. Although efficiency can be termed as the hygiene factor, it is this effectiveness that has the potential to provide a scope for competitive advantage. The primary and secondary elements of the value chain and their interrelationships make the value chain behave as a complex system, where the system mostly remains in a seemingly critical state of instability. This instability can be seen as the opportunity for the strategic managers to provide a basis for competitive advantage. Value chain can be seen as a collection of activities that a firm undertakes in order to provide the offering to the market; with the attributes that the market wants, and with the price that the market is willing to pay. The methodology in the author's earlier paper embraces Analytic Induction technique, but the methodology adopted in this paper is Grounded Theory. This paper extends the findings of the author's previous paper across two dimensions: With an addition of a totally different case from India that exemplifies how value chain is used to achieve competitive advantage; and with reaching similar findings with the help of a different methodology. This