Value Chain Management: A Design Thinking Tool for Organizational Success

VALUE CHAIN MANAGEMENT
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Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................. 3
Value chain management........................................................................................... 4
Beginner’s mindset......................................................................................................7
Conclusion.................................................................................................................. 9
Reference list............................................................................................................ 10
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Introduction
Design thinking can be termed as process of mitigating different problems
with the help of creative and innovative ideas (Glen, Suciu & Baughn, 2014). For this
study, specific tools for design thinking such as beginner’s mindset and value chain
analysis will be selected. In context to these tools, appropriate information, learning
from the module, activities, strengths and weaknesses will be discussed.
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Value chain management
Information
Value chain helps in understanding the different activities and their categories
in an organisation, which create a service or product when combined. It is possible to
analysis an organisation with the assistance of this tool and portrays its major
strengths and weaknesses (Bustinza et al., 2015). Therefore, one can ascertain the
unmet requirements of an organisation through this. These activities contribute value
and cost in the organisation’s deliverables. Value chain can be termed as an
important design-thinking tool. Its ability to emphasise on the chain activities that an
organisation follows to deliver its services or products is one of its major benefits.
Through this, one can gather a different perspective about a certain problem that an
organisation is facing.
Therefore, this enhances the quality of problem solving and organisations are
able to maintain their quality in processes. On the other hand, this can be also be
used to identify or detect the problems in the activity chain of an organisation.
Compared to other design thinking tools, value chain provides the opportunity to
determine and consider activities in the analysis, which are not visible to the
consumers (Mol, 2015). This segments the activities in to two segments, which are
support and primary. Support activities of an organisation generally include firm
infrastructure, procurement, human resource management, and technology
development. Further, primary activities involve inbound and outbound logistics,
operations, marketing, and sales.
Activity
We conducted an activity related to this design-thinking tool was to take a
piece of paper and construct the value chain of an airline company, Virgin. The initial
step of this activity was to identify the different endpoints of the company’s value
chain activities from the viewpoint of a user. After this, it was required to initiate a
backward evaluation and identify all the activities involved within the organisation in
a “step-by-step” approach. Further, enhanced details were provided for all the
different considered activities of the organisation. This analysis included activities
such as marketing and selling seats, luggage check-ins, flight, de-boarding,
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