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Value Chain Analysis – Research-Methodology

Posted on by Betty R. Sattler

Value chain analysis is a strategic analytical and decision-support tool that highlights the bases where businesses can create value for their customers. The framework can also be applied to identify sources of competitive advantage for businesses. Value chain is a set of consequent activities that businesses perform in order to achieve their primary objective of profit maximization.

Most sources explain the essence and application of value chain analysis assuming their audience is businesses aiming to increase the level of their competitiveness. Here, we adopt an alternative approach. Below is an explanation of value chain analysis for business students who have been assigned to apply this strategic analytical tool as part of assignment given by their educational institution.

The concept value chain analysis was introduced by Michael Porter in 1985[1] and its significance and relevance to strategic management and marketing has not diminished during 30 years of its existence.

The framework divides activities that generate value into two categories – primary activities and support activities. Primary activities comprise a set of activities that contribute to the creation of value in a direct manner. Support activities consist of functions and tasks that are intended to support primary activities.

Value chain analysis

It is important to clarify that the relevance of value chain analysis is not limited to manufacturing businesses and the framework can be applied towards service firms as well.

Primary Activities

Inbound logistics involve receiving and storing raw materials and their usage in manufacturing as the necessity arises.

Operations relate to the processes of transforming raw materials into finished goods. For businesses operating in services sector operations relate to the process of providing the service.

Outbound logistics is associated with warehousing and distribution of finished products.

Marketing and sales refer to the choice and implementation of marketing strategy to communicate the marketing message

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From Deepika Padukone To Sonam Kapoor: Steal The Limelight With Bollywood Inspired Gold Toned Jewellery This Wedding Season

Posted on by Betty R. Sattler

Amidst the trending emerald jewellery look, some bollywood celebrities have donned the gold-toned jewellery on various occasions. Gold jewellery is not just a fashion accessory but holds immense significance for a woman as it transcends from her grandmother to her mother and her. From Deepika Padukone to fashionista Sonam Kapoor ditched the diamond and sapphire and went for traditional gold-toned jewellery. If you are looking for inspiration then this is going to be your ultimate guide on how you can adorn gold jewellery this wedding season.  

Deepika Padukone Heavy Traditional Gold Jewellery

Deepika Padukone has adorned heavy gold jewellery at her wedding. From Matha Patti to heavy Jhumkas, Deepika went for gold-toned all this while. She has styled a gold choker heavy and a long gold studded Rani Haar. Her jewellery went perfectly with her outfit making her look like a beautiful South Indian bride.  

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Shilpa Shetty’s Classy Gold Necklace

If you are looking to style gold-toned jewellery for your engagement ceremony then Shilpa Shetty’s classy necklace will inspire you to pick something like that. Shilpa Shetty has styled a gold-toned choker necklace with a pendant for an award ceremony. This classic piece is perfect to style for pre-wedding (trending wedding accesories) functions.

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Vidya Balan Stuns In Simple Gold Necklace

For newly wed brides Vidya Balan’s simple gold necklace is serving as the perfect inspiration. The gold-toned necklace that she has adorned has pearl beads which makes the whole ensemble stand out. She has accompanied her necklace with a gold chain and gold earrings. 

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Don’t Miss: 5 Times When Bollywood Divas Stole The Show With Their Accessories

Bipasha Basu’s Golden Long Haar

Bengali beauty Bipasha Basu has styled a long gold-toned (how to polish

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The Many Faces of Saoirse Ronan

Posted on by Betty R. Sattler



Actor, style icon, wild-swimming enthusiast, fledgling producer and director in the making: Saoirse Ronan is nothing if not versatile. The protean performer, who has captivated viewers on both screen and stage, talks to Charlotte Brook about taking pride in her Irish roots, navigating life in the public eye and why she still has big ambitions to fulfil.

Words by CHARLOTTE BROOK. Photographed by AGATA POSPIESZYNSKA. Styled by CHARLIE HARRINGTON

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Givenchy coat, and dress, both price on application; Neous shoes, $960; Cartier ring, $8450.

SAOIRSE RONAN is trying to persuade me that making yourself cry in front of a camera is “a joy”. As ever with the actor, she’s very convincing. “Any pent-up sadness, anger and frustration that you inevitably carry around with you gets let out,” she continues in her still-strong Irish brogue, pushing her white-blonde bob into a scruffy side-parting. “So, ironically, it’s the best thing ever.”


It’s one of many such insights that come as an unexpected bonus of an interview that, in theory, should be an impossible equation: a conversation with a four-time Oscar nominee, whose performances have mesmerised, charmed and broken the hearts of audiences for nearly 20 years, in which we can talk about anything except films. Like her peers, in a campaign for better pay and working conditions for their community, she is supporting the SAG-AFTRA strike, which prohibits actors from promoting or even naming any studio TV or movie projects, past or present. On the one hand, this is frustrating, as I have much to ask about her fantastic-sounding forthcoming releases — but on the other, sidestepping the specifics of her career does present an opportunity for Ronan to step back and reflect on her broader storytelling motives, ambitions

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The MSC Chain of Custody Standard

Posted on by Betty R. Sattler

The Chain of Custody Standard provides assurance that all seafood sold with the blue MSC label comes from a fishery that has been certified as sustainable.

47,800


supply chain sites certified to handle MSC certified seafood

20,000+


products sold with the blue MSC label

66


countries where labelled products are available

Why certify supply chains?

Seafood products can pass through long and complex supply chains between the ocean and reaching consumers. At each stage, there is a risk that products will be mislabelled or that products from an MSC certified fishery will be mixed up with non-certified products.

Certification to the Chain of Custody Standard ensures an unbroken chain where certified seafood is easily identifiable, separated from non-certified products, and can be traced back to another certified business. 

This system allows businesses and consumers to be confident that seafood with the blue MSC label has come from a fishery certified as sustainable. 

Find out more about our Standard


For <a href=supply chain companies”/
Chain of Custody

For supply chain companies

Demand for sustainably caught seafood is increasing. Find out how to get certified and sell and promote MSC certified products.


For certification bodies
Chain of Custody

For certification bodies

The MSC Chain of Custody Standard and General Certification Requirements documents for certifiers.

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Indigenous fashion show celebrates tradition, modern trends

Posted on by Betty R. Sattler

BOZEMAN — An Indigenous fashion show that drew a standing-room-only crowd to American Indian Hall at Montana State University was the perfect backdrop for a celebration of cultural tradition through the lens of modern art, say organizers of the successful Native American Heritage Month event.

“It was such a positive place to be,” said Riley Werk, a sophomore majoring in English education who helped organize the Nov. 13 show. “Not a lot of people, even in Indian Country, have seen a fashion show like this.”

Werk is part of the three-person cultural outreach team in MSU’s American Indian/Alaska Native Student Success Services. Together with cultural outreach specialist La’Trell Hendrickson in MSU’s Department of Native American Studies, Werk and fellow student-employee Watson Whitford conceived the idea for the show and worked since the start of the semester to make the event happen.

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“We started talking about a fashion series that includes workshops to make ribbon shirts and ribbon skirts because the Native fashion industry has become one more way of showcasing Native art,” Hendrickson said.

The team reached out to two professional Indigenous designers, both MSU alumni and members of the Crow Tribe: Angela Howe of Choke Cherry Creek Designs and Brocade Stops Black Eagle of Brocade Designs. They agreed to provide the clothing for the show, so Werk set about recruiting models. Meanwhile, Whitford, a freshman majoring in plant biology, began inviting Indigenous design vendors from tribes around and outside Montana. Thirty-five mostly student models representing every Native American nation in the region and several vendors of Indigenously designed wares — including earrings, clothing, cosmetic items and beadwork — signed up to participate. Some vendors traveled from out of state to attend.

On the night of the show before a diverse

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There’s a New Head at Amazon Fashion

Posted on by Betty R. Sattler

The Amazon Fashion machine has a new leader — Jenny Freshwater, who has been with the e-commerce company since 2010 and is taking on the title of vice president of fashion and fitness.

That puts a new hand on the wheel at what Wells Fargo has estimated is a $67 billion apparel and footwear business in the U.S. alone, including third-party sales.

More from WWD

Freshwater was most recently vice president of traffic and marketing technology, which the company said made her “responsible for building global, cross-channel and traffic-driving marketing capabilities, including via social media, creator growth and global shopping events like Prime Day, Black Friday and Cyber Monday.”

Before that, she held leadership roles in Amazon’s operations unit and served as vice president of forecasting.

Freshwater takes over the business from erdirik–dogan-president-amazon-fashion-interview-drop-1235861320/” data-ylk=”slk:Muge Erdirik Dogan, who led Amazon’s fashion business since February 2021;elm:context_link;itc:0″ class=”link “Muge Erdirik Dogan, who led Amazon’s fashion business since February 2021.

Erdirik Dogan left to become the chief technology officer at Nike Inc., according to a report on Bloomberg, citing a memo to Nike employees from chief executive officer John Donahoe.

In February, Nike’s global chief digital information officer Ratnakar Lavu — then the company’s top technology official — left the company. Nike and Erdirik Dogan did not immediately respond to queries.

Erdirik Dogan brought an interesting pedigree to the fashion industry having received a PhD from Carnegie Mellon in optimizing supply chains in chemical plants.

That helped her oversee a sprawling fashion business that includes apparel, shoes, sports, outdoors, exercise equipment, luxury fashion and jewelry as well as the Shopbop and Zappos subsidiaries.

She successfully brought big fashion brands on board, including Coach, which has crowed over the technology, presentation and audience offered on the site and includes

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Diwali gifting guide 2023: Luxury items to buy for your loved ones from the Jio World Plaza

Posted on by Betty R. Sattler

The iconic Louis Vuitton Alma Bag was the second handbag ever, by the LVMH label, after the Speedy. It was created by Gaston-Louis Vuitton in 1934 and had quite a fan following that included Rihanna and Jackie Kennedy. The epi leather BB bag is an extremely chic and popular option that works with every outfit.

Cartier Juste Un Clou Bracelet

Cartier

The Cartier Juste Un Clou bracelet boasts a minimalist design that stood the test of time, based on the shape of a nail, as the name suggests in French. Introduced in 1971, and released in 2012, the bracelet gained a cult following, the sophisticated bracelet with the simple French name was rereleased, under the Juste Un Cloud name. One can find the jewellery in rose gold, white gold and yellow gold, along with diamond accents.

Rimowa Cabin Suitcase

Rimowa

For those looking for a confluence of travel and luxury, there is Rimowa’s Cabin suitcase, available in various sizes. The sturdy, robust and lightweight, aluminium suitcase with grooves meets functionality and design and is created keeping longevity in mind.

Also read:

The best-dressed celebrities at Jio World Plaza’s launch night red carpet—from Deepika Padukone, Ashley Graham, Alia Bhatt, Janhvi Kapoor and more

Exclusive: Inside Gucci’s new Jio World Plaza boutique in Mumbai

Sara Ali Khan sported these four luxury bags during her recent Europe vacation

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How Huawei Transformed Its Supply Chain In the Digital Era

Posted on by Betty R. Sattler

Huawei transformed its supply chain with digital technologies and innovated its operations and management models, taking customer experience and revenues to new heights.

Now is the time for digital transformation

As well as enabling rapid growth, digital technologies help enterprises transform industrial value and reshape business models globally. Comparing the market capitalization of the world’s top-ten companies in 2010 and 2020 shows that digital natives, such as Apple, Amazon, Alibaba, and Tencent, are edging out companies in traditional industries like Shell and ExxonMobil.

The time is now for enterprises to digitalize if they hope to survive and thrive.

Objectives of Huawei supply chain’s digital transformation

Focusing on improving customer experience and creating value through digital and proactive supply chain, Huawei launched its integrated supply chain plus (ISC+) digital transformation project in 2015. To transform its operations and management models, the project comprised an intelligent two-layer supply chain business system, service-oriented processes and IT, and scenario-based algorithm modeling

Transformation covered six areas that centered on transitioning from:

  1. An offline-focused business model to both offline and online.
  2. A working model based on transmitting information in series to an operations model based on the collaborative and parallel sharing of information.
  3. High volumes of manual operations to automated system operations.
  4. A decision-making model based on personal experience and intuition to a decision-support model enabled by data analytics, unified data warehouses, and data models.
  5. Push-type planned allocation centered on Shenzhen HQ to pull-type resource allocation driven by forecasts.
  6. A centralized management model to one that facilitates independent decision-making by field offices, with capability support and supervision from HQ.

Our digital transformation journey

ISC+ supply chain transformation has moved through the phases of digitalization and intelligent digitalization. Digitalization built the foundation of Huawei’s digital capabilities, including its data foundation and service-oriented processes/IT. Intelligent digitalization builds on

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MSU holds Indigenous fashion show

Posted on by Betty R. Sattler

BOZEMAN, Mont. — Montana State University held an Indigenous fashion show at the American Indian Hall as part of Native American Heritage Month.

The school’s American Indian/Alaska Native Student Success Services outreach team coordinated the event.

The outreach team reached out to two professional Indigenous designers who provided clothing for the show.

There were 35 models in the show, mostly students, representing Native Americans.

Montana State University released the following:

An Indigenous fashion show that drew a standing-room-only crowd to American Indian Hall at Montana State University was the perfect backdrop for a celebration of cultural tradition through the lens of modern art, say organizers of the successful Native American Heritage Month event.

“It was such a positive place to be,” said Riley Werk, a sophomore majoring in English education, who helped organize the Nov. 13 show. “Not a lot of people, even in Indian Country, have seen a fashion show like this.”

Werk is part of the three-person cultural outreach team in MSU’s American Indian/Alaska Native Student Success Services. Together with cultural outreach specialist La’Trell Hendrickson in MSU’s Department of Native American Studies, Werk and fellow student-employee Watson Whitford conceived the idea for the show and worked since the start of the semester to make the event happen.

“We started talking about a fashion series that includes workshops to make ribbon shirts and ribbon skirts because the Native fashion industry has become one more way of showcasing Native art,” Hendrickson said.

The team reached out to two professional Indigenous designers, both MSU alumni and members of the Crow Tribe: Angela Howe of Choke Cherry Creek Designs and Brocade Stops Black Eagle of Brocade Designs. They agreed to provide the clothing for the show, so Werk set about recruiting models. Meanwhile, Whitford, a freshman majoring in plant biology, began inviting

… Read the rest

Westfield fashion sales fall, jewellery hardest hit

Posted on by Betty R. Sattler

Sales in fashion, footwear and jewellery have fallen across Westfield shopping centres in the first quarter of FY24.

According to Westfield’s parent company Scentre Group, fashion slipped by 3.3%, footwear by 2% and jewellery by 7.4%, all against the same period in 2022.

For the first nine months of 2023 to September 30, jewellery sales were down 6.5%, while fashion and footwear were up by 0.6% and 3.5% respectively.

Meanwhile, department stores sales were down by 5.1% for the quarter and 0.2% for the first nine months of 2023, while discount department stores were up in both periods – 2.7% and 5.3% respectively.

The only other sectors to record declines in both the quarter and the first nine months were homewares and ‘other’, which include gifts and souvenir shops.

When compared to 2019, all sectors recorded positive growth in sales except for ‘other’. The largest growth category was leisure and sports, up 34.3% from Q1 FY24 compared to Q1 FY19. Fashion is up 15.8% in the same period, alongside footwear (10.4%) and jewellery (11.8%).

Discount department stores saw the second-largest growth, up 29% in Q1 FY24 compared to Q1 FY19, while department stores grew by 5.3%.

Overall, Scentre Group recorded a 3.2% growth for the quarter compared to the same period in 2022, driven by food retail, supermarkets, and leisure and sports.

Scentre Group CEO Elliott Rusanow said this was met with 28 million more visitors for the quarter than last year to 410 million.

“On a rolling 12-month basis customer visitations now exceed 500 million,” Rusanow said.

“Creating more reasons for customers to visit and spend their time in our Westfield destinations has generated continued business partner sales growth. Total business partner sales for the 9 months to 30 September 2023 were $19.7 billion, $1.3 billion or 7.3% higher

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