Implication of Customer: Value Orientation in 3G Supply Chain - A Pilot Study

Implication of Customer: Value Orientation in 3G Supply Chain - A Pilot Study

Customer value is considered to be the core value of an enterprise’s competitiveness advantage. However, it is not sufficient that customer value created relies solely on the resources of one enterprise. Supply chain, as an extension of the resources outside the enterprise, helps establish strategic alliance relationship of collaboration, information, opportunity and risk sharing between enterprises to produce customer value collaboratively. 3G mobile industry, which has increasingly predominated in telecommunication service industry, gets increasingly intensive market competition. Therefore, customer value is the key issue for those who want to own 3G market. Hence, 3G mobile network operators must compass the whole movements of 3G supply chain based on analysis of 3G customer- value orientation. Currently there are very few research studies about the relations between customers need and operating process to make products and services for customers. This pilot study is with a view to helping 3G mobile network operators basically attain the evolvement of 3G industry, the relationship between customer value and the working components of 3G supply chain, conduct and design corporately and flexibly the operating process of 3G supply chain as well as create the perfect products and services through orienting 3G customer-value. The ultimate aim of this paper is to present the three-tier framework that help 3G mobile network operators make their good decision in choosing the aspects to improve their market in order to attract new customers, retain old ones. Based on this expectation, the paper attempted to indentify some critical factors influencing the adoption of 3G supply chain via literature review. A questionnaire was proposed at the end of the paper in order to measure the importance of these factors in a future study. This study includes the Analytic Hierarchy Process method (AHP) which assumes that all given values in a question can be assigned, by 3G experts who are the rare ones grasping both working components of 3G supply chain and customers need, from the most preferred to the least, thus allowing us to identify a respondent's preference order for all alternatives. In this study, the judgments made about the relative importance of the objectives of infrastructure and network vendors, platform vendors, application developers, and distribution and marketing channels, and those about the improving 3G supply chain management to satisfy those objectives, must be made in good faith, then the AHP calculations would confirm precisely the logical consequence of those judgments based on experts’ viewpoints of 3G supply chain management. This model is applied to telecom operators in Taiwan.