Question

Can company’s achieve competitive advantage even if they use the same Enterprise Systems? Address this statement in the context of a company of your choice. In providing your answer state why have you chosen the company and discuss whether this company can achieve competitive advantage using the same enterprise systems as their competitors. Please refer to your readings to support your answer.

Answer 1

Companies can very much achieve competitive advantage even if they have the same underlying Enterprise systems. Competitive advantage is a function of the value proposition of what the organization proposes to sell to its customer. A value proposition is customer facing and independent of the internal systems we use to manage efficiencies within the organization.

Consider for example a technology company which builds and customizes cybersecurity products to large enterprises. There are many such companies in the world e.g. McAfee, Symantec Corp. etc. There is a small company called K7 Computing in India which operates in this space and has a small yet profitable business selling cybersecurity products to mid-size companies in India largely in the manufacturing, pharmaceutical and retail verticals. Internally the company uses the same Enterprise solution to handle its CRM (a key aspect of B2B Sales) as most of it's competitors. Yet it continues to build and sustain its competitive edge in the Indian market. This is largely due to its value proposition of understanding the requirements of these verticals and translating those to product benefits which it then clearly articulates to its customers through a strong pre-sales network. This added to its robust Customer Success program completes the value proposition. All this is delivered through the same Enterprise solution (Microsoft CRM) which is configured to their internal processes.

To summarize, elements of competitive advantage are built through core value propositions and not supporting systems. Hence it is possible to achieve differentiation even with the same or even identical underlying enterprise systems.