What are Value Chain Analysis? Describe significance of Value Chain Analysis in MIS?

What are Value Chain Analysis and describe the significance of Value Chain Analysis in MIS? 

 

Explain what is meant by BPR? What is the significance of BPR? 

How Data warehousing  & Data Mining is useful  in terms of MIS?
Answer:

Value Chain Analysis:

Value chain analysis is a powerful tool for managers to identify the key activities within the firm which form the value chain for that organisation, and have the potential of a sustainable competitive advantage for a company.

·         All organisations consist of activities that link together to develop the value of the business, and together these activities form the organisation’s value chain.
·         Such activities may include purchasing activities, manufacturing the products, distribution and marketing of the company’s products and activities
·         The value chain analysis has been used as a powerful analysis tool for the strategic planning of an organisation for nearly two decades.
·         The aim of the value chain framework is to maximise value creation while minimising costs.


Business Process Re-engineering (BPR)

This process of change for the betterment of the organization is called as Business process re-engineering.
·         This process is mainly used to modernize and make the organizations efficient.
·         The existing system in the organization is totally re-examined and radically modified for incorporating the latest technology.
·         BPR directly affects the performance.
·         Significance of BPR

o   It is used to gain an understanding the process of business and to understand the process to make it better and re-designing and thereby improving the system.

o   BPR is mainly used for change in the work process. Latest software is used and accordingly the business procedures are modified, so that documents are worked upon more easily and efficiently. This is known as workflow management.

o   It involves changes in structure, organizational culture and processes.

o   BPR implementation is done to achieve cost reduction, increase in quality, improvement in speed and service.

o   BPR enable a company to become more competitive in the market.

Importance of Date warehousing and Data Mining in MIS

Data Warehouse is defined as collection of database which is referred as relational database for the purpose of querying and analysis rather than just transaction processing. Data warehouse is usually maintained to store heuristic data for future use. Data warehousing is usually used to generate reports.

·         The main output from data warehouse systems are; either tabular listings (queries) with minimal formatting or highly formatted "formal" reports on business activities.

·         This becomes a convenient way to handle the information being generated by various processes. Data warehouse is an archive of information collected from wide multiple sources, stored under a unified scheme, at a single site.

·         The data stored and the subsequent report generated out of a querying process enables decision making quickly.

Data Mining

Data Mining is the process that attempts to discover patterns in large data sets. It utilizes methods at the intersection of artificial intelligence, machine learning, statistics, and database systems.

·         It is a collaborative tool which comprises of database systems, statistics, machine learning, visualization and information science.

Right from data collected in data warehouse to presentation, there can be the following steps:

The Knowledge discovery as a process may consist of following steps:

1. Data Cleaning: It removes noise and inconsistent data.
2. Data integration: It is where multiple data sources are combined.
3. Data selection: Data relevant to the analysis task are retrieved from the database.
4. Data transformation: Data are transformed or consolidated into forms appropriate for mining by performing summary or aggregation operations, for instance.
5. Data mining: An essential process where intelligent methods are applied in order to extract data patterns.
6. Pattern evaluation: To identify the truly interesting patterns representing knowledge based on some interesting measure.
7. Knowledge presentation: Visualization and knowledge representation techniques are used to present the mined knowledge to the users.

When you look at the above step you will find that data mining is a very important step in knowledge representation.

Since MIS is all about data processing and pulling out useful information from huge pile of data, we can clearly see how data warehousing and data mining form an important part of MIS process.