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Introduction – Business Idea
Coffee Bean Importer (CBI) is the core business idea for the project proposal. CBI will be developed as platform where International vendors can come together to do business and list products, identify potential customers and generate sales leads. CBI would enable potential customers to browse through the variety of product listings, contact vendors, purchase products and get those delivered to desired location. The core business functions for CBI include vendor management, product management and customer management, while the support functions include sales, finance and accounting, human resources, customer service, legal and IT management.
A value chain described the range of activities that are required in the lifecycle of a product or service and described the primary and support functions. In general there are four links to a value chain that describe the lifecycle of the product that are design, production, marketing and consumption (Kaplinsky, & Morris, 2001).
In this paper the primary and support functions are discussed in detail for the business idea of Coffee Bean Importer.
Core Business Processes and Business Functions
Primary Activities
Vendor Management
Vendor management activity is one of the core value propositions for the CBI business model. Vendor management allows the vendors to interact with the CBI platform and create a business environment for various product lifecycle activities. This activity provides vendor registration, product registration for each of the vendors and customization capabilities. The vendor management provides all related capabilities for a vendor to search other vendors by location, and product. The value to vendors is a business environment for each vendor to interact with other vendors, communicate and create relationships and business deals.
Product Management
The product management activity allows the customer to register their products upon the CBI portal. Each customer can register their product as a buyer or seller. When a product is being sold then, that product must be associated with some vendor. This section provides reliable information for all the products, their corresponding vendors, pricing, delivery time and all other related information. It provides a great value addition for both, the sellers and the buyers.
Customer Management
Customer management provides a facility to track and present each of the customers that are interested in one or more product listed by a vendor. The customer management section would provide details of the customers and their requirements. On the CBI portal customer management is a great value addition for the vendors as the potential sales lead.
Support Activities
Sales and Marketing
Sales and marketing business activity includes various tasks that support the CBI platform. The objective of sales and marketing activity is to present the CBI product to as many audiences as possible. The marketing efforts will be focused to increase the span of potential customers on the CBI platform. The marketing function would include various activities like advertising, SEO, publications, events and blogs. Sales business function would focus on ensuring that the products listed on the platform by various vendors are getting moved to relevant customers (Chen, Fay, & Wang, 2011).
IT Infrastructure Management
The IT infrastructure management is one of the most important business support activity. Its importance increases even more as CBI is an online product and it would require the various stages of development, deployment, and maintenance. The CBI primary activities are all web based software processes. The support function of IT would involve managing the software as well as hardware requirements of the business function.
Legal
The legal support activity ensures that the business is running without any legal hassles. It ensures legal representation for the business in case of any legal issues. The legal function comes into play when vendors sign any deal with each other using CBI platform or when the financial transaction takes place over the business web portal. The legal function is responsible for creating any kind of SLAs and other legal processes and policies.
Human Resources
The human resource management business support activity is all about hiring, training, utilization and compensation for the employees of the business. The HR function primary focus is the recruitment and training. The secondary activities include monitoring of employees’ performance and ensuring compliance with company’s regulations.
Finance / Accounting
Finance and accounting business support activity ensures that the financial condition of the business is in the correct shape. This support function comes into picture right from the start of the business and stays active for all the stages and activities of financial nature.
Customer Service
The customer service support activity can be considered the essence of the business. Without customers a business cannot exist so it is important to provide a high level of satisfactory customer service. A good customer service is essential for the success of the business.
Business Process Model
Business process models are an important aspect of business modeling and must be listed and understood before the actual execution of project plan for product development. It is also important to list and understand the feasibility of each process with regards to the complexity and effort requirements of the project (Becker, Rosemann, & Von Uthmann, 2000).
Vendor Process management
The vendor process management is one of the primary features of CBI business model. This process allows its users on the web portal to register themselves as vendors. It provides the ability for the users who have registered as vendors to add their products and list them over the CBI portal, where other potential customers or buyers can come online and purchase the product. Vendor process management includes vendor registration, vendor authentication, product addition against a vendor and payment options.
The process starts with authentication of the user using the provided and password. If the user does not have an account with CBI, it will be prompted to create an account with CBI free. Once a vendor is registered then that vendor is directed to the addition product section, where he can add product details for supplying. Vendors can be searched based on product type, state, and city.
Product process management
The product process management is the next step that comes under the CBI portal. The primary purpose that is served by this process is to allow the addition of new product, searching of products, and purchase of the product by interested customers. The product process will be visible to both the vendors and customers, where customers are those users who have not registered as vendors. The product can be purchased by any user that is vendor or customer. However, a vendor cannot purchase its published product. The product process management provides tools for product payment and invoice generation, integration of stable services for product purchase allowing a flexible payment through either of a credit card, debit card or online net-banking services.
Customer Process Management
Customer process management is another core activity of the CBI platform that focuses on the overall lifecycle and service management for its customers. The customers are a backbone and the primary focus of any business entity, and the case of CBI tool is no different. Under the customer process management addition and registration of new customers, management of customers’ payment services, invoice generation, billing and delivery and grievance management come into the picture. Customer process management must ensure that there is a tight communication between the placing the customer orders and the release of the product by vendors for the customers (Trkman, 2010).
Reference
Becker, J., Rosemann, M., & Von Uthmann, C. (2000). Guidelines of business process modeling.
In Business Process Management (pp. 30-49). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Chen, Y., Fay, S., & Wang, Q. (2011). The role of marketing in social media:
How online consumer reviews evolve. Journal of Interactive Marketing, 25(2), 85-94.
Kaplinsky, R., & Morris, M. (2001). A handbook for value chain research(Vol. 113).
Ottawa: IDRC.
Trkman, P. (2010). The critical success factors of business process management.
International journal of information management, 30(2), 125-134.
