Week 7 – The revision of our analysis on De beers

On my previous blog, I have discussed about our analysis on De beers in terms of Five Forces analysis, value chain, core competencies, and how information system has helped De beer’s business. However, my friend and I still realized that we still made some mistakes on our previous analysis. Therefore, we decided to revise it again and below is our analysis on De beers after we revised it and let’s get started with the first one which is from five forces analysis and De beers value chain.

And about De beer’s core competency, we have found that De beers is so expertise in the diamond industry which makes it as De beer’s core competency. In fact, De beers has an outstanding diamond expertise as they have a long history to develop unique and innovative of their jewelry design since the creation of De Beers Diamond Jewelers in 2001. Moreover, this group also has become the world’s leading diamond company, especially with unrivalled expertise in the exploration and mining of diamonds throughout the world. In addition, De beers is also often being said as the one that is able to develop a beautiful and iconic new jewelry design as it is commonly designed with a unique and so architecturally elegant design as De beers also has an advanced technology to produce diamonds with the same quality.

Moreover, we all know that De beers delivers more than a third of the world’s diamonds, and  as the world’s largest diamond supplier, we all know that it is very necessary for them to have a supporting tool that can help them to keep their operation safe, secure, and well connected. In fact, we have found that De beers has used GIS for over twelve years in which it primarily functions in their exploration division and the first installation of GIS was actually in their exploration group where it now has more than 200 users with additional users in other divisions, including De Beers Marine and Mining, and Mineral Resources Management. Also, we found that GIS is actually directly linked to the Prospecting Information System as it will play an important role in the integration and one of the main goal or objective that we should know is that it is actually to make sure that all ventures in the De Beers Group Exploration have the same spatial database structure to facilitate information sharing and access to spatial data. In fact, the basis of the spatial database will actually utilize ESRI’s ArcSDE to manage spatial data distribution. Moreover, the enterprise application being designed for initial implementation is simply called as “the prospecting information management system” that will have responsible for providing prospecting information, and also generating a Personal Geodatabase for field usage and analysis.

Overall, that is all that I would like to share to you and I hope that this blog can be useful and give you some knowledge, also. Thank you very much and have a great day 🙂

Week 6 – The Analysis of De Beers

On my previous blog, I have discussed about 5 forces that simply as a tool that used for analyzing competition of a business. As a student, learning a theory is not enough without practice and I strongly believe that it is better for us to learn also about how to apply those five forces in analyzing a company’s business environment. Based on the title of this blog, my friend and I have decided to choose De beers as we believe that De beers has a strong a value of sustainability and so expertise in the diamond industry, also. All necessary information actually already explained in our paper, and what I am going to share to you is about the information that basically contains Five Forces analysis, value chain, core competencies, and how information system has helped De beer’s business. First of all, let me show you the Five Forces analysis and De beers value chain as followed.

Moreover, about De beer’s core competencies, we have found that there are three strong core competencies that De beers has, including;

1. Expertise in the diamond industry. In fact, De beers has an outstanding diamond expertise as they have a long history to develop unique and innovative of their jewelry design since the creation of De Beers Diamond Jewelers in 2001. This group has actually become the world’s leading diamond company, especially with unrivalled expertise in the exploration and mining of diamonds throughout the world. In addition, De beers is also often being said as the one that is able to develop a beautiful and iconic new jewelry design as it is commonly designed with a unique and so architecturally elegant design as De beers also has an advanced technology to produce diamonds with the same quality.
2. Strong brand image and Marketing. In fact, De beers has the ability to develop the value through branding and marketing, and De beers is also good at promotional strategies, especially in advertising which also some of the best in the industry that make them have a strong brand image. Besides, De beers has also introduced iconic slogan which is called “Diamond is Forever” as one of the best and brilliant concept that making it one of the successful campaign in history even also as the top advertising slogan of the past century. In fact, De beers has successfully dominated in the global diamond industry as they always a couple steps ahead of their competition and one thing that we should know is that De beers actually has the website information that very useful to allow the users to get the information about what is De beer’s expertise and product offerings as this website information can be said to be a promotional tool to increase size of their new customers.
3. Have relationships with foreign governments. In fact, De beers has already achieved the competitive advantage in the diamond industry through the implementation of cartel competition. In addition, De beers also gained the competitive advantage by expanding their supply chain as they emphasize their market dominance in every stage of their supply chain and be able to increase their profits like they could continue to generate the profits in the section of supply chains by vertically integrating their supply chain, but also expanding their business to get profits at the wholesaler and retailer levels. Actually, one thing we should know in here is that De beers actually have effective mutually relationships with foreign governments and of course, we can say that it will be easier for De beers to achieve the competitive advantage in terms of securing access to natural resources and positions in the cartel.

We all know that as the world’s largest diamond supplier, De beers delivers more than a third of the world’s diamonds, and it is very necessary for them to have a tool that can help them to keep their operation safe, secure, and well connected. We found that De beers has used GIS for over twelve years in which it primarily functions in their exploration division. In fact, the first installation of GIS was actually in their exploration group where it now has more than 200 users with additional users in other divisions, including De Beers Marine and Mining, and Mineral Resources Management. We found that GIS is actually directly linked to the Prospecting Information System as it will play an important role in the integration. One thing that we should know here is that one of the main goal or objective of the project actually is to make sure that all ventures in the De Beers Group Exploration have the same spatial database structure to facilitate information sharing and access to spatial data. Then, the basis of the spatial database will actually utilize ESRI’s ArcSDE to manage spatial data distribution and basically, the enterprise application being designed for initial implementation is simply called as “the prospecting information management system” that will have responsible for providing prospecting information, and also generating a Personal Geodatabase for field usage and analysis.

So that is all that I would like to share to you and thank you very much for those who read this blog and have a great day 🙂

What I have learned in week 5

Hi everyone! On this blog, I am going to share to you about what I have learned and understood about information system, organization, and strategy. Firstly, let me start it with five forces that generally used to analyze the competitiveness of your business environment and how those five forces can affect your long-term profitability. In addition, this Porter’s five forces actually can be powerful tool and highly recommended to become business strategy tool as it helps you to achieve the competitiveness and help you to avoid taking wrong steps in the future. In general, there are five forces that including competitive rivalry, supplier power, buyer power, threat of substitution, and threat of new entry. First of all, let me start it with the first one which is competitive rivalry. Competitive rivalry basically means that it is more discussing about how many rivals do you have and how good is the quality of their products or services with yours? One thing that you’d better know is that if the rivalry is so intense, companies can generally be able to attract more customers by giving special price and even high-impact marketing campaign as we all know that there is a chance where your suppliers and buyers can go and look for another if they do not get a good deal from you. However, if the competitive rivalry is low like no one is doing what you do now, then you will be considered as the ones which have tremendous strength and healthy profits as well. Secondly, supplier power. Supplier power basically refers to how easy is it for your suppliers to increase their prices like it is determined by how many potential suppliers do you have, how unique is the product or service that they provide, and how expensive would it be to switch from one supplier to another? It generally means that if you have more to choose from, it will be easily for you to choose another alternative. However, if you have small number of suppliers, of course there is a chance where you will keep relying on them and the more likely you will be charged more by them as it also can affect your profit. Thirdly, buyer power. Buyer power is basically about how many buyers are there, how much their orders and how much would it cost them to switch from your products and services to those of a rival? And it simply means that if it comes to smart customers, they will have more power and your strength will increase if you have a lot of customers. Next one is threat of substitution. Threat of substitution simply refers to the substitution performance and basically it also refers to the possibility that your customers find different ways of doing what you do. Lastly, Threat of new entry. Threat of new entry is basically more like how easy is it to have a foothold in your sector market, how much would it cost, and how tightly is your sector regulated? Besides, one thing that we have to know about threat of new entry is it also refers to the cost of entry which is more like setting the cost and it will be better to have specialist knowledge and economic scales as it is very important thing to reduce the unit cost and economic cost by producing enlarge quantity.

In addition, I learned that knowing information system strategy is also an important thing to be learnt and actually there are several things we must know regarding this one such as low cost leadership, product differentiation, focus in market niche which generally means to focus on a specific target, and increase switching cost for customers as well. In short, information system is actually just a supporting tool to maintain and achieve the competitive advantage. We all know that value chain method is also very important thing to be known as it is generally about the analyzes on what will you do next to the company and talking about this thing, it is better if we also talk about a core competency as it is a MUST in businesses because it can provide value to customers and also open door to new markets.

Overall, that is all that I want to share to you and I hope that this blog can be useful and give you some knowledge as well. Thank you very much and have a great day 🙂