TUI Deutschland Uses Information Systems to Gain a Competiti

TUI Deutschland Uses Information Systems to Gain a Competitive Advantage To succeed, a business needs an edge over its competitors: a competitive advantage. A big part of creating a competitive advantage is using information systems effectively, meaning a business can\'t simply buy computers and expect good results. As Oscar Berg puts it in his blog The Content Economy, \"What lcreatesl competitive advantage is how we use technologies, how we let them affect our practices and behaviors If technologies are carefully selected and applied, they can help to create competitive advantage.\" This chapter discusses the five forces that define any competitive situation: rivalry among existing firms in an industry, the threats of new competitors and of substitute products services, and a firm\'s relationships with suppliers and customers. Firms use these forces to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage, which is one that others cannot copy immediately to eliminate the edge an innovator can have. TUI Deutschland is Germany\'s leading tour operator Targeted pricing is vital in its market, with the travel company that sets prices to accommodate customers preferences and habits gaining a competitive advantage. For a large tour operator like TUI, setting optimal prices is not easy. Each season, the employee responsible for a particular tour must set around 100,000 prices for each destination region. The factors that affect the final price of hotel rooms. for example, include facilities, types of rooms, arrival dates, and expected demand \"In the past, decision-making processes were not clear,\" explains Matthias Wunderlich, head of Business Intelligence at TUI Deutschland GmbH. \"There were too many gaps in e system, since the information needed to make pricing decisions was hidden in different places. The result

Solution

a)

Decision support system helps the user to get decision by analyze the data. a few decision support systems are rising only for specific company managers whereas other is obtainable for everyone on internet. Some decision supports systems have their own doubt language, graphics and spreadsheet to get and analyze data.

Expert system is an information system which stores the knowledge of human expert and
then, display reasoning and decision taking similar to human. Every expert system has two
main components: knowledge base and inference rules.

Knowledge base is the complete subject knowledge or human expert Whereas inference rule
are the logical judgment on the basis or knowledge base every time user states the Situation to the expert system

b)

Supply Chain

Supply chain is the integrated chain which connects Suppliers, manufacturers, warehouses / stores systematically.

Supply chain concerns with manufacturing of products and its distribution. It includes forecasting, purchasing, production planning, warehousing and distribution.

Focus of supply chain is on enterprise perspective that means forecasting of demand and to fulfil that demand doing planning, distribution transportation etc.

Value Chain

Value chain is a chain of activities of a firm operating in a particular industry which add value to product or services offered by firm in market.

Value chain is a part of supply chain.

Value chain perspective is much broader than supply chain. It covers all business process from the supplier to customer. This includes customer management, supplier management, demand supply management etc.

To categorise the value chain activities all activities of organisation classified in two parts. 1. Primary Activities 2. Supporting Activities

It is a systematic approach of examining various activities to obtain the competitive advantage

d)

The successful implementation of enterprise resource planning systems is to make it easier to track the work flow accross various departments.They reduce the operational costs involved in manually tracking and duplicating data useing individul and diparate systems.
1. Complete visibility into all the inportant processes, across various departments of an organization .

2.Automatic and coherant workflow from one department to another, to ensure a smooth transition and quicker completion of processes..This also ensures that all the inter-departmental activities are properly tracked.

3. A unified and single reporting system to analyze the statistics/status etc. in real time. across all the functions and departments.

4.ERP are especially helpful for managing globally dispersed enterprise companies better.

e)

ERP: The acronym for ERP is Enterprise Resource planning.

It is defined as the information system for identifying and planning the wide resources to

ship and account for customer orders.

It manages internal and external resources, including financial, material and human resources

Role of ERP in an organization:

It integrates all data and processes of an organization into a unified system.

In the world of business application ERP is the latest high software solution in IT.

Many organization have realized that there is a rapid changes in the business

Environment. So, they need to gather all data time to time and they need to keep their

software up-to—date.

They have designed and developed software that offers integrated software solutions to

all functional process in an organization.

CRM {Customer relationship management}:

Definition of CRM:

It maintains the relationship between the organization and its customers.

To build a customer relationship organization uses :

Goals to be satisfied between customer and organization.

To maintain customer rapport.

Produce positive feelings in organization and customers.

Role of CRM in an organization:

CRM have major impact on organization through:

Shifting focus from product to customer.

Streamlining the offer of customer requirements and organization can’t make it.

For an effective CRM highlight the required competencies.

The main role of CRM is to increase the profit of the company.

This will be achieved by providing better services to the organization.

A good CRM will reduce cost, wastage and complaints.

SCM Chain Management :

It is defined as; it manages the flow of goods and services.

It has a design, planning execution, control and monitoring of the supply chain activities.

Role of SCM in organization:

> It plays a more significant role in organization. The SCM footprint of an organization is

getting bigger from tactical to strategic.

> As you can see how department and trading partners collaborate and interact with each

Other in the same way SCM software changes.

> The main role is to provide a trading partner to articulate and integrate their plans with

other traders and stakeholders.